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Unit 2: A Free Man’s Worship by Bertrand Russell

Thus, just as we distinguish three separate senses of “is” (the is of predication, the is of Notes
identity, and the is of existence) and exhibit these three senses using three separate logical
notations (Px, x = y, and “x respectively) we will also discover other ontologically significant
distinctions by being made aware of a sentence’s correct logical form. On Russell’s view, the
subject matter of philosophy is then distinguished from that of the sciences only by the generality
and the a prioricity of philosophical statements, not by the underlying methodology of the
discipline. In philosophy, just as in mathematics, Russell believed that it was by applying
logical machinery and insights that advances in analysis would be made.
Russell’s most famous example of his “analytic method” concerns denoting phrases such as
descriptions and proper names. In his Principles of Mathematics, Russell had adopted the view
that every denoting phrase (for example, “Scott,” “the author of Waverley,” “the number two,”
“the golden mountain”) denoted, or referred to, an existing entity. By the time his landmark
article, “On Denoting,” appeared two years later in 1905, Russell had modified this extreme
realism and had instead become convinced that denoting phrases need not possess a theoretical
unity.
While logically proper names (words such as “this” or “that” which refer to sensations of
which an agent is immediately aware) do have referents associated with them, descriptive
phrases (such as “the smallest number less than pi”) should be viewed as a collection of
quantifiers (such as “all” and “some”) and propositional functions (such as “x is a number”).
As such, they are not to be viewed as referring terms but, rather, as “incomplete symbols.” In
other words, they should be viewed as symbols that take on meaning within appropriate
contexts, but that are meaningless in isolation.

2.5 Russell’s Neutral Monism

One final major contribution to philosophy was Russell’s defence of neutral monism, the view
that the world consists of just one type of substance that is neither exclusively mental nor
exclusively physical. Like idealism (the view that there exists nothing but the mental) and
physicalism (the view that there exists nothing but the physical), neutral monism rejects dualism
(the view that there exist distinct mental and physical substances). However, unlike both
idealism and physicalism, neutral monism holds that this single existing substance may be
viewed in some contexts as being mental and in others as being physical. As Russell puts it,
“Neutral monism”—as opposed to idealistic monism and materialistic monism—is the theory
that the things commonly regarded as mental and the things commonly regarded as physical
do not differ in respect of any intrinsic property possessed by the one set and not by the other,
but differ only in respect of arrangement and context.
To help understand this general suggestion, Russell introduces the analogy of a postal directory:
The theory may be illustrated by comparison with a postal directory, in which the same names
comes twice over, once in alphabetical and once in geographical order; we may compare the
alphabetical order to the mental, and the geographical order to the physical. The affinities of
a given thing are quite different in the two orders, and its causes and effects obey different
laws. Two objects may be connected in the mental world by the association of ideas, and in
the physical world by the law of gravitation. … Just as every man in the directory has two
kinds of neighbours, namely alphabetical neighbours and geographical neighbours, so every
object will lie at the intersection of two causal series with different laws, namely the mental
series and the physical series. ‘Thoughts’ are not different in substance from ‘things’; the
stream of my thoughts is a stream of things, namely of the things which I should commonly
be said to be thinking of; what leads to its being called a stream of thoughts is merely that the
laws of succession are different from the physical laws.

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