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UNIT-3
LOGICAL POSITIVISM
Logical positivism which can also called logical empiricism is a philosophical movement was
born in Vienna in the 1920s. It was characterized by the view that scientific knowledge is the
only kind factual knowledge and all other metaphysical sciences should be considered as
meaningless. It was an energetic form of philosophy based on advances in mathematics and
physics. Natural and social scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers came together to
debate and develop the logical positivist program at Vienna. Later the philosophical forum
came to be known as Vienna Circle.
Logical positivism is the name given in 1931 by A. E. Blumberg and Herbert Feigl to a set of
philosophical ideas put forward by the Vienna circle. Synonymous expressions include
"consistent empiricism," "logical empiricism," "scientific empiricism," and "logical neo-
positivism." The name logical positivism is often, but misleadingly, used more broadly to
include the "analytical" or "ordinary language philosophies developed at Cambridge and
Oxford.
Vienna Circle and A J Ayer’s Verification Principle
Vienna Circle
Logical positivism is a 19th century Viennese empirical philosophy. It is closely linked with
British empiricism and culminating in the anti-metaphysical, scientifically oriented teaching of
Ernst Mach. In 1907 the mathematician Hans Hahn, the economist Otto Neurath, and the
physicist Philipp Frank came together as an informal group to discuss the philosophy of
science. They hoped to give an account of science which would do justice to the central
importance of mathematics, logic, and theoretical physics, without abandoning Mach's general
doctrine that science is, fundamentally, the description of experience.
Later Moritz Schlick came to Vienna as professor. He also joined together with other
philosophers such as Otto Neurath, Friedrich Waismann, Edgar Zilsel, Bela von Juhos, Felix
Kaufmann, Herbert Feigl, Karl Menger, Kurt Godel, and Victor Kraft. The head of the group
was Moritz Schlick.
In 1926 Rudolf Carnap was invited to Vienna as instructor in philosophy, and he quickly
became a central figure in the circle's discussions; he wrote more freely than the other
members of the circle and came to be regarded as the leading exponent of their ideas.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper were not members of the circle but had regular
discussions with its members. In particular, Wittgenstein was in close contact with Schlick and
Waismann. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus had a profound influence on the
deliberations of the circle, where it was interpreted as a development of British empiricism.
The circle ascribed to Wittgenstein the "verifiability principle" -that the meaning of a
proposition is identical with the method of verifying it. There only one trained philosopher
among the members of Vienna Circle; he was none other than Herbert Feigl who actually gave
the name logical positivism to the group's doctrines in 1931. Moritz Schlick, the leader of the
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group, was a physicist, and Kurt Godel was a rnathematician. Hans Hahn, a rnathematician;
Otto Neurath was an economist, Phillip Frank a physicist, Friedrich Waisrnann also was a
physicist. Rudolf Carnap carne late to the group and had been trained as a physicist and
philosopher. Among them, Carnap was leading most important and influential philosopher and
an exponent of logical empiricism and grew out of the discussion of the circle. The Vienna
Circle had a branch in Berlin headed by Hans Reichenbach, a philosopher who had studied
with Ernst Cassirer, David Hilbert, Max Planck, and Max Born. Carl Hempel was a member of
the Berlin Circle who became a leading twentieth-century philosopher. He is perhaps second
only to Carnap as an exponent (and critic) of logical empiricism.
The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle had many followers in Scandinavia, Australia, New
Zealand, and the United States, who spread their doctrines as missionaries. When the Nazis
came to power, the views and ethos of the logical positivists spread throughout the English-
speaking world and beyond to Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Poland. Logical positivism
was a dominant focus in analytic philosophy until the early 1960s and much of analytic
philosophy was dedicated to attacking, defending, elaborating, or questioning the central tenets
of the Vienna Circle. The spirit of logical positivism is still alive, perhaps a bit subdued.
Sources of logical positivism: Logical positivism developed from several sources. Among the
most important were the philosophical methods and ideas of Frege and Russell, including their
logicism especially as interpreted by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus (Logico-Philosophical Treatise). Since many of the early logical positivists were
scientists and mathematicians, they were also inspired by recent innovations in physics,
especially Einstein's theory of relativity. Although the logical positivists were not especially
interested in the older traditions of philosophy, except to overthrow them, many of their views
harked back to the classical British empiricists and more recent German-speaking empiricists
such as the physicist Ernst Mach.
The Demise of the Vienna Circle
By 1936 the Vienna Circle was already splitting up. The logical positivists were leaving Austria
and Germany. The reasons for this were partly philosophical but primarily political. Since all
the members of the Vienna Circle and allied Berlin Circle were liberals, socialists, or Marxists,
the rise of Nazism made them uncomfortable in their native land.
In 1936, (the Vienna murder) Moritz Schlick was murdered by a former student of his. At the
trial the student claimed he was offended by Schlick's arrogant Jewish attitude to religion and
morality. (Schlick was not even Jewish!) The local Nazis vigorously supported the criminal and
made him a hero. Sentenced to ten years in prison, he was paroled after only two and joined
the Austrian Nazi party. None of the original members of the Vienna Circle continued to
defend their main tenets after the mid-1930s. Instead, they devoted their philosophical energies
to moving away from what they considered to be the crude and overly simplified views of their
earlier period. Only A. J. Ayer continued tenaciously to defend the fundamentals of logical
positivism.
A. J. Ayer (1910 – 1989)
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Many young philosophers traveled to Vienna and to various congresses to learn first-hand
ideas which appeared to challenge what they regarded as established philosophical dogma. A.
J. Ayer visited Vienna. According to him, all philosophical questions are purely linguistic in
nature. After returning from Vienna, Ayer wrote his influential work, Language, Truth and
Logic. Thus, Logical Positivism or Scientific Empiricism was introduced to English readers by
A. J. Ayer’s book Language, Truth and Logic (1936).
Principle of Verification
The most famous doctrine of logical positivism is its verifiability principle. According to logical
positivism, there are only two sorts of statements which have meaning. They are analytic and
synthetic statements. The first encompassed necessary truths of logic, mathematics and
ordinary language. Ex, all bachelors are unmarried. If it is true then it must be tautology or if
it is false then it must be contradiction. It does not provide any new information. The second
encompassed empirical propositions about the world around us and which were not necessary
truth. They provide factual report of some observation or generalization based on observation.
Therefore, the proposition that “the ground is wet” needs to be verified. The statement is
meaningful if it is verifiable. Therefore, the principle of verification was developed as a means
for identifying the second of the above two types of statements. According to this principle, the
validity and meaning of any proposition is dependent upon whether or not it can be verified.
Thus, a statement which cannot be verified is held to be automatically invalid and meaningless.
This became for many people a basis for attack on metaphysics, theology and religion because
those systems of thought make many statements which cannot, in principle, be verified in any
way. Principle of verification was criticized by many so Ayer made a distinction between strong
verification and weak verification. In strong verification, a statement is meaningful if it can be
verified empirically whereas in weak verification, a statement is said to be meaningful if it is
verifiable in principle at least.
Bertrand Russell: Logical Atomism
Introduction
Bertrand Russell was best known for his contributions to logic and philosophy but his range of
interests was impressively wide. He was not only deeply involved with mathematics,
philosophy, science, and logic but he was also interested in political activism, social justice,
education, and sexual morality. His work has fundamentally changed the way philosophy is
practiced and the way we understand logic, mathematics, and science. In 1950, Russell won the
Nobel Prize in Literature.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born into a Noble English family on May 18, 1872.
Bertrand’s early life was traumatic: orphaned by the age of four, he and his elder brother
Frank were sent to live with their strict grandparents. Lord Russell died when Bertrand was
six, and thereafter the boys were raised by their austerely religious, authoritarian
grandmother. Russell’s youth was filled with rules and prohibitions, and his earliest desire was
to free himself from such constraints. His lifelong distrust of religion no doubt stems from this
early experience. As it was customary for children of his social class, Russell was initially
tutored at home. Later, he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he achieved first-class
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honors in mathematics and philosophy. At Cambridge, under the teaching of the Hegelian
philosopher by McTaggart, Russell became a proponent of idealism (the belief that all reality is
ultimately a product of the mind). However few years after graduation, Russell and his
colleague G.E. Moore had rejected idealism in favor of realism (the belief that the external
world exists independently of experience and consciousness). Russell became part of a general
revitalization of empiricism (the belief that all human knowledge is derived from our sensory
experience of the external world).
Russell’s important early work was concerned with mathematics. Russell’s great contribution
to logic and mathematics was his defense of logicism (the theory that all mathematics can, in
some fundamental way, be reduced to logical principles). Along with G. E. Moore and with
Russell’s student Ludwig Wittgenstein, Russell is considered one of the founding proponents of
analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy which has come to be virtually synonymous with
“logical positivism” refers to a belief that philosophy should be executed with the same rigor
and precision as scientific inquiry. Although the subject matter differed across his career,
Russell’s analytic methodology remained more or less constant. Many of the particulars of
Russell’s analysis have been challenged or refuted, but his legacy as an analyst remains
undeniably influential.
Logical Atomism
Russell developed a metaphysics and philosophy of language based on his symbolic logic. He
called it logical atomism. Logical Atomism is a philosophical theory that says that all
propositions can be analyzed into simple independent elements of meaning corresponding to
elements making up facts about the world. The metaphysics of logical atomism can be
understood on analogy with physics and chemistry. In these two sciences, the larger objects are
built up out of smaller atomic ones. Russell holds that language when fully analyzed consists of
atomic propositions and molecular ones constructed out of them by the logical functions such
as nor, or, and, if... then and so on. In this fashion all of language and thought could be
constructed out of the simplest atomic elements.
Although developments in physics influenced Russell, the prime motivation for his logical
atomism came from his work on the foundations of mathematics. Since mathematics could be
rebuilt firmly on the basis of the simplest elements and operations, Russell embraced the idea
that every organized idea of knowledge could be so treated. When you analyze a body of
knowledge, namely physics into the simplest basic elements and then rebuild it step by step
from those simple elements, the rebuilt theory or body of knowledge would be vastly improved
over the old vague and disordered one but still contain all its truths. The rebuilding process
would exhibit clearly the essential structure of the body of knowledge. The world is built of
logical atoms. Atomic facts are built of simples. Russell does not explain what the simples are.
But he just says that they are metaphysically necessary for the construction of reality.
Sometimes these simples are taken to be particular instantaneous sense impressions, such as
patches of color or sounds, momentary things and they can also be qualities or relations. These
logical atoms are as the sort of last residue in analysis.,
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Molecular facts are built of atomic facts. Language will consist of atomic propositions
representing atomic facts and molecular propositions. The molecular propositions are built up
out of the atomic ones by logical functions, not, or, and, if... then. For example, “P and Q” it is a
logical molecular proposition. Its truthfulness and falsity depend on the truth and falsity of the
P and Q individually.
The common structure of language and the world is represented by symbolic logic. The
structure of language is also the structure of thought. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logic-
Philosophicus was influenced by Russell and his logical atomism. And finally, Oxford Ordinary
Language Philosophy is simple the reaction to this logical atomism. For example, the following
sentence: “The King of America is bald.” Even this deceptively simple sentence can be broken
down into three logical components:
· 1. There exists a King of America.
· 2. There is only one King of America.
· 3. The King of America has no hair.
Of course, we know that there is no King of America. Thus, the first assumption, or atom, is
false. The complete statement “The King of America is bald” is untrue, but it isn’t
properly false because the opposite isn’t true either. “The King of America has hair” is just as
untrue as the original statement, because it continues to assume that there is, in fact, a King of
America. If the sentence is neither true nor false, what kind of claim on the truth can it make?
Philosophers have debated whether the sentence, in fact, has any meaning at all. What is clear
is that applying the concepts of logical atomism to language reveals the complexity of the
concepts truth and validity.
Logical Atomism is a doctrine first developed by Russell in the course of conversations with
Wittgenstein, and published in 1918. Russell wanted above all to avoid idealism and holism: he
disliked ‘the monistic logic of the people who more or less follow Hegel’ and wished instead to
endorse ‘the commonsense belief that there are many separate things. Just as physical analysis
reaches its bedrock in physical atoms, or the ultimate constituents of matter, so (Russell
argued) logical analysis must terminate in ‘logical atoms’ – on the one hand universals
(‘predicates or relations and so on’), and on the other particulars (‘such things as little patches
of color or sounds, momentary things’). Wittgenstein developed a far more subtle version of the
doctrine (based on ‘facts’ rather than ‘things’) in the Tractatus.
Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy
Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born on 18 May 1872 to a very reputed family in Britain.
Lord John Russell, who was twice Prime Minister of UK and who introduced the Reform Bill
of 1832 was his paternal grandfather. In his formative days he was influenced by the
philosophies of René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, George Berkeley, David Hume, Peano,
Gottlob Frege, G. E. Moore and A. N. Whitehead. It was in the Trinity College, where he joined
in 1890 to study mathematics and he worked with eminent philosophers of that day like A. N.
Whitehead, Henry Sidgwick, James Ward, and G. F. Stout. He was also influenced by the
Hegelian philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart and took the idealism of Kant and Hegel seriously.
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His initial philosophical allegiance was to a kind of idealism, highly influenced by the thinking
of Hegel, but more specifically by the neo-Hegelian Oxford philosopher F. H. Bradley, who
advocated a version of idealism that reduced all reality into one single spiritual entity. He later
rebelled against idealism and abandoned his idealistic phase and along with G. E. Moore,
initiated what is known today as analytic philosophy. Russell and Moore carried out detail
analysis of the philosophical theories advocated, and position adopted by many of the
traditional philosophical schools, particularly idealism, with an intention to expose the
linguistic confusions from which they had emerged. They held that such philosophical theories
were the result of certain fundamental linguistic confusions, and a proper logical analysis of
language will make things clearer.
The real turning point in Russell’s intellectual life happened when he engaged himself reading
mathematics and got interested in logic. He thus began to work on a problem that occupied
him to a major part of his career; to see whether mathematics can be supplied with logical
foundations. Many people have influenced him in this endeavor, including the Italian logician
Giuseppe Peano, whom he met in 1890 and Gottlob Frege, who was also engaged in a very
similar kind of exercise. As a result of his work on the topic he has published the important
book The Principles of Mathematics in 1903.
Along with these excursions into the realm of mathematical logic, Russell was also developing a
philosophical position that would later supplement his logical works. This is known as logical
atomism, where he construed certain very basic and elementary statements which he called
atomic propositions, as constituting language. The structure of language is reflected in the
structure of atomic propositions. This structure of elementary linguistic expressions is
incidentally identical with the structure of reality as well. These major intellectual
developments happened during the period 1899—1900, a period in which certain important
changes happened in his academic pursuits, which Russell himself calls a revolution.
Russell’s Refutation of Idealism
Idealism is the view, which proclaims that reality is fundamentally mental. Russell’s refutation
of idealism is unique, as he applies the method of language analysis in order to expose the flaws
of idealism as a philosophical position. Incidentally, he himself was under the influence of
German idealism during the 1890s and advocated a kind of Hegelian and Bradelian view that
asserted that all reality is mental and conceived the universe ultimately consisting of a single
Mind which experiences itself.
Since idealism asserts a form of monism—all reality is a single spiritual entity—it rejects the
plurality of things, which we normally experience as mere appearance. According to the
idealist, everything is related to everything else in the universe and the universe is ultimately a
single thing. Russell, on the other hand held a realist view, which affirmed that objects of
experience were independent of the experience of them. This view ultimately leads to pluralism,
which asserts that there are many independent things in the world. In order to establish his
view, he pursues to refute the fundamental doctrine of idealism, its monistic outlook. According
to him, the basis of idealism is the idea that all relations are internal. They affirm that the
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relation of experience to its objects are internal and hence in reality there are no such relations
and therefore, all relations are unreal.
Russell initiates a linguistic analysis of this idealistic view in order to refute it. He holds that
both idealism and monism are the results of a linguistic confusion. The idealist holds a
fundamentally mistaken view about relations. They thought that all propositions are of the
subject-predicate form, where we predicate something to the subject. For example, when we
say sugar is sweet, we are predicating sweetness to the object sugar. Hence in this sense we can
argue that it is the nature of sugar to be sweet and hence the relationship between sugar and
sweet is internal. Consequently, the relationship between them is not something between two
things. In other words, they are not different from each other and hence the so-called
relationship is unreal.
From this simple fact the idealist argues that every proposition constitutes a predication on
reality as a whole. Since all relations are internal and therefore are unreal, the relationship
articulated by all propositions is unreal. There exists only one entity, which is homogenous and
spiritual. Russell argues that the mistake of the idealist is to consider all propositions, including
relational propositions as possessing a subject-predicate form. Russell seeks to demonstrate
that this is not the case. For instance, the proposition, “A is to the left of B” which expresses a
relationship which cannot be internal. We cannot say that it is internal to the nature of A to be
the left of B. The relation “to the left of” does not belong intrinsically to any spatial object. In
other words, no spatial object must of necessity be to the left of other things.
Again, for A to be the left of B there should be two separate entities of A and B. This refutes the
fundamental position of idealism and advocates pluralism. Hence Russell’s approach is
characterized by the method of language analysis. He approaches the philosophical position of
idealism from the point of view of language analysis and examines how legitimate is their
monism and idealism, so that they can logically argue for pluralism. Russell seeks to expose the
logical contradictions inherent in this view and argues that by analyzing the structure of the
propositions held to be true by the idealists we can expose these logical contradictions. The
logical analysis of language will bring out this structure. From these basic aspects of language
analysis, Russell moves on to develop his theory of logical atomism.
Logical Atomism
Russell initially adopted a form of phenomenalism, which held that perceptual knowledge
could be analyzed in terms of our acquaintance with the fundamental data of sensory
experience. His book Our Knowledge of the External World and his paper “The Relation of
Sense-Data to Physics” advocate this position. In his 1927 book, The Analysis of Matter Russell
analyses the chief concepts of physics, such as force and matter, in terms of events and here he
had adopted a realist position. He holds that, in order to analyses the basic concepts of physics
one has to admit that certain entities exist independently of our perception of them. This is to
go beyond mere phenomenalism.
Logical atomism is a philosophical view about language, which aims at explaining the
relationship between language and the world. It was primarily developed in order to resolve
questions about the nature of perception and its relation to physics. It aims at establishing the
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empirical basis for physical science. Hence it comes up with a theory of the world. Russell thus
initiates a metaphysical theory about the physical world and tries to give an account of the
nature of reality by exposing its logical structure. His idea of logical analysis is founded on the
contention that mathematical logic is the essence of philosophy. In his classic paper “On
Denoting”, Russell describes the process of analysis, where he examines the structures of
propositions and facts. In this process of language analysis, he distinguishes the surface
grammar of propositions, which is misleading, from the depth grammar, which refers to the
essential logical structure of language.
Russell argues that all propositions are not of the subject-predicate form. According to him, the
surface grammar of statements may often mislead us. We may take descriptions and ordinary
names to be denoting expressions, while on several occasions they need not do so. Russell
proposes a logical analysis of language in order to resolve such confusions. Such an analysis
can bring this out by revealing the structure of propositions. In the above-mentioned paper
“On Denotation” Russell takes up an expression “The present King of France is bald” for
analysis. His analysis shows that this statement asserts three things:
[Link] exists at present at least one person who reigns in France.
[Link] exists at present at most one person who reigns in France.
[Link] reigns in France is bald.
Now Russell proceeds further and tells that the statement “There exists at present at least one
person who reigns in France” is false, as France is not a monarchy. Therefore, concludes
Russell, the conjunction of the three statements is also false. It is imperative that, in order to be
either true or false the subject of a proposition must refer to something. But since the
expression “present King of France” has no reference in the world, the expression is
meaningless.
Russell thus affirms that the logical structure of the world and of language is revealed in the
proper logical analysis of language. He conceives the world as consisting of facts, which are
things with many qualities related in different ways. Russell contends that, a fact can be
analyzed into its constituents like things, qualities, and relations. Now, corresponding to facts in
the world, there are propositions in language and the former are expressed by propositions,
which are forms of words asserted as true or false. By comparing the propositions with the
world of facts we assert their truth or falsity.
From these basic contentions Russell examines the basic features of language that are revealed
in its logical analysis. The analysis of propositions brings out their logical structure. We can
analyze propositions into more and more elementary forms of propositions, which express
basic facts and Russell calls them atomic propositions. An atomic proposition asserts that a
thing has a certain quality or stands to some other thing in a certain relation. By combining
atomic propositions by means of logical words such as and, or, and if—then, we derive a
complex or molecular proposition. Russell affirms that, if all the atomic facts are known, and
that they are all the atomic facts, we could infer all other truths from them, as they are the
most elementary forms of expressions that represent facts in the world.
Therefore, the logical analysis of language exposes the ultimate simple units of linguistic
expressions that have immediate acquaintance with the world of facts. Atoms are the last
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residues of logical analysis. All complex propositions we employ in various fields can be
logically analyzed in this fashion. If they cannot be analyzed, if we find any of the expressions
lacking a referent in the world, then the proposition in which it appears needs to be treated as
meaningless. We can thus proceed to more and more precise, clear and definite knowledge
from the obvious and vague ordinary beliefs about the world. We thus arrive at the simple
symbols, which immediately refer to facts from the complex symbols or propositions, which we
analyze. Through analysis we can reach the point of direct acquaintance with the objects.
These objects, according to Russell, are the meanings of simple symbols.
The very idea of logical analysis of language presupposes that there is a hidden structure in
language, which is not always obviously visible. In other words, the apparently visible structure
need not be the real one and hence it may mislead us. Russell’s analysis of the statement, “the
present King of France….’ Reveals this. Russell thus makes a distinction between the surface
grammar of linguistic expressions from the depth grammar. While the former is more visible, it
is also misleading. The latter may lie hidden, but does represent the real structure, which is
revealed in logical analysis. Logical analysis thus shows how misleading the surface grammar
can be.
Our ordinary languages have misleading structures. The logical structure of linguistic
expressions is not apparent from the surface grammar of ordinary languages. Hence, they
should be logically analyzed. The ambiguous, misleading expressions of ordinary languages can
be logically analyzed through descriptions. This according to Russell will reveal the logical
structure. This possibility suggests that an ideal language can be developed, which does not
have the limitations of ordinary languages. Such an ideal language will be free from all possible
logical errors. It thus brings out the logical structure or the depth grammar of linguistic
expressions and leaves no room for doubts or confusions. In such a language, each word will
have an object to represent, and an object will have one and only one symbol. This notion of an
ideal language is not Russell’s creation, as it has been existent in philosophical circles since
long. But Russell’s idea of logical analysis had given it a new life. Many philosophers,
particularly the thinkers of the logical positivism movement were inspired by such Russellian
ideas.
Russell is a very important thinker in the history of western philosophy, as his endeavours,
along with G.E. Moore had opened a new way of philosophizing in the beginning of 20th
century. He has influenced and inspired many different movements in 20th century Anglo-
Saxon philosophy. Arguably his most important contribution is The Principles of
Mathematics, which laid the foundations of mathematical logic. This book and many other
writings of Russell have significantly contributed to the development of symbolic logic.
The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918-19)
Lecture 2: Particulars, Predicates, and Relations By Bertrand Russell
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
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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 its 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
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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
 12

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.
 13

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
 14

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 –
 15

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
 16

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 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
 17

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
 18

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?
 19

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 whatever 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.
Wittgenstein: The Picture Theory
Introduction
Dissatisfied with earlier attempts by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein
attempted to elucidate the nature of logical truth in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).
Wittgenstein was concerned with the relation between language and the world and the logical
and mathematical ramifications of this relation. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein asserted that in
order to describe reality, logic is necessary, but not sufficient and, in so doing, put forth what
has come to be known as the picture theory of meaning. In his picture theory of meaning,
Wittgenstein argued that language mirrors reality. However, Wittgenstein was not concerned
with ontology, per se. He believed that the language used in this sort of metaphysical inquiry
simply mirrored the logical structure of its subject matter, making the inquiry itself
unnecessary by virtue of the impossibility of its very nature. Wittgenstein’s picture theory of
meaning succeeded in explaining the possibility of falsehood, but ultimately broke down due to
its reliance on the atomic propositions it posited, which proved to be untenable.
The Theory
Wittgenstein opened the Tractatus by giving a metaphysics of a world consisting of atomic
facts, completely independent of one another, but Wittgenstein gave no examples of what he
considered to be atomic facts. He claimed that they existed, but not that he had identified them.
Next, Wittgenstein stated that all propositions are truth-functional relations among these
atomic propositions, that each atomic proposition consists in unanalyzable names designating
simple objects, and that the sense of any one of these propositions is the state of affairs it
depicts.
An understanding of Wittgenstein’s terse, abstract metaphysics is key to understanding his
picture theory of meaning, which immediately follows it in the Tractatus. The main theses of
the Tractatus are that the structure of language consists in complex propositions consisting of
atomic propositions, which in turn consist of names and that the language-to-world connection
is a picturing relation. Thus, when one thinks of what is the case in the world, facts, ones
thoughts picture these facts, and since propositions are expressions of thoughts, these too are
pictures of facts.
Before Wittgenstein developed his picture theory of meaning, Russell’s theory of judgment had
laid a foundation upon which Wittgenstein was able to build. Russell had already determined
that names were simple and propositions composite, that relations between the components of
 20

propositions represented facts and that propositions represented reality by depicting truly or
falsely how things are, not by standing for something. What had not yet been determined was
how we can say how things are not and the possibility of falsehood, i.e., that a proposition can
have meaning even when the state of affairs it depicts does not obtain.
The components of any model or picture are multiple and each goes proxy for the components
of the state of affairs depicted. The structure of the picture is the arrangement of its
components. The logical form of the structure of a picture must be shared with the state of
affairs it depicts. Therefore, the components of the picture must be equinumerous and
combinable with the state of affairs the picture depicts such that the picture can mirror all
possible combinations in that state of affairs.
All of these features are present in propositional representation. A proposition pictures, or
describes, reality by depicting a state of affairs. Atomic propositions are simple, their
components being unanalyzable names. These names go proxy for simple objects to which they
are correlated and which give them meaning. The state of affairs, or possible combination of
objects, a proposition depicts is its sense. Facts represent facts, simple names represent simple
objects and relations represent relations.
The essence of the picture theory of language is that what shows what logically simple names,
or primitive signs, stand for is the way they are used in propositions. Without the logical
framework of propositions, these signs are meaningless. While the meaning of a sign is the
object it goes proxy for, it is impossible to elucidate this meaning without a proposition that
shows the connection between the name and the object it goes proxy for.
Thus, Wittgenstein establishes the theses of the Tractatus, namely that only those propositions
that picture reality are significant, that is, only factual propositions are significant. This
conclusion inevitably follows from Wittgenstein’s theory that it is only by picturing reality that
propositions acquire sense, or meaning. And since reality is the sum of all facts, or states of
affairs, be they those that obtain or those that do not, talking or thinking about anything that
falls outside of the realm of facts is, quite literally, nonsenical, since such talk or thought does
not depict anything. From this it follows that, as Wittgenstein himself points out in the
Tractatus, the propositions that he has used to state his theory are also senseless. As for logic,
its propositions are sometimes true, sometimes false, depending on the truth-values of their
constituent atomic propositions, but this only yields tautologies and contradictions. Therefore,
these propositions also lie outside of what is the case, or the world, and thus have no sense.

The Possibility of Falsehood

The strength of the picture theory of meaning lies in the fact that it explains the possibility of
falsehood, or how propositions can be false and still be meaningful. When propositions are
true, they correspond to reality, but when they are false, this doesn’t invalidate their
meaningfulness despite the fact that they don’t correspond to reality. Whereas Russell’s dual-
relation theory of judgment had failed to solve this problem, Wittgenstein’s picture theory of
meaning succeeded in doing so. His solution was that propositions depict possibilities by nature
 21

of the fact that their components are combined in a certain way. The possibility of such a
combination is assured by the components of the propositions mirroring the things they go
proxy for and not by an additional logical form.
It is not necessary for facts to correspond to propositions as a whole in order for them to depict.
All that is necessary is that there be a one-to-one correlation between the components of the
propositions and those of the facts they depict in the world and for components of the former to
be in relation to the components of the latter in isomorphic manner. Thus, the given relation
between the components of the picture represents the like relation between the corresponding
things, regardless of whether this fact obtains. To make a false proposition is simply to combine
existing components in a way that they are not combined in reality. In other words, it is not the
components of the proposition that do not correspond to reality, but the manner in which they
are combined. Such propositions present states of affairs that represent possible situations. But
Wittgenstein maintained that propositions represented possible states of affairs by describing
them.
The Tractatus reduced all logical complexity to propositional calculus and all propositions to
truth-functions of atomic ones. Such atomic propositions must be logically independent of one
another, which made the nature of the atoms they were built on evasive. Ultimately,
Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning broke down with his realization that the atomic
propositions he had posited were untenable. Wittgenstein himself attacked the core doctrine of
his picture theory of meaning, isomorphism. He realized that neither propositions nor the
possible states of affairs they depict, which he had argued shared a definite logical form, have
atomic components. Once the idea of atomism is taken out of the picture, saying that a
proposition and what it depicts have something in common only states an internal relation. In
his later philosophy, Wittgenstein continued to sustain this internal relation in referring to
“pictoriality” in propositions, but rejected the picture theory of meaning. Wittgenstein no
longer saw the relation between thought and reality as a metaphysical one between a
proposition and facts in the world, but simply as a grammatical one. Conclusion
The invariable, inflexible relationship between language and the world expounded in the
Tractatus shows that Wittgenstein thought language had to be one way or another. His later
philosophy contradicts this view. In it, Wittgenstein attacks the idealism and logical necessity of
the Tractatus that gave rise to notions of an ideal, logical language. Apart from the later
Wittgenstein’s notion of pictoriality, all that was left of the picture theory of meaning was a
comparison between propositions and literal pictures. This gave a new theory of meaning, but
left the original question of logical necessity unanswered. While Wittgenstein’s picture theory
of meaning succeeded in explaining the possibility of falsehood, it failed to explain the nature of
logical truth because of the untenability of the atomic propositions it posited.
 22

UNIT- 4

IV-Linguistic Analysis
Linguistic philosophy is the view that many or all philosophical problems can be solved (or
dissolved) by paying closer attention to language, either by reforming language or by
understanding the everyday language that we presently use better. There are two positions in
this movement: earlier and later positions. The former position is that of ideal language
philosophy, one prominent example being, Logical Positivism. The latter is the view defended
in Ordinary Language Philosophy.
Linguistic philosophy is a kind of tendency of analysing the language. It originated in Britain
and America under the influence of the philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle and
others. it is largely against speculative philosophy (metaphysics) and is concerned with critical
activity. It is an activity of criticism and clarification. On this account , Philosophy does not
have any subject matter of its own . For linguistic philosophers, philosophy is not to answer the
big questions of life and the universe, but rather to clarify the language in which we talk about
these problems. For, we know that many of our philosophical problems are from linguistic
confusions.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Theory of Language Games
Later Wittgenstein
Later Wittgenstein realized that picture theory of meaning is great mistake. So in Philosophical
Investigations, he emphasizes on the concept of language-games to make his thought clear.
Therefore he abandoned Tractatus that meaningful sentences must have a precise hidden
logical structure and this structure corresponds to the logical structure of the facts portrayed
by those sentences. The meaning of a sentence is its use.
 23

In fact, there are many different languages with many different structures that could meet
quite different specific needs. Language was not strictly held together by logical structure, but
consisted of a multiplicity of simpler substructures he named as language games. Sentences
could not be taken to be logical pictures of facts and the simple components of sentences did
not all function as names of simple objects
Language Game
For Wittgenstein,language game was introduced to draw a parallel between using language
and playing games. It was also to highlight the multiple functions of language. Language game
represents different forms of life. Just as there are different forms of life, there are different
language games. The rules of one language game do not have any validity in another language
game.
Wittgenstein argued philosophers look for generality of each word but there is no common
essence. He tried to explain then the different uses of the same word not because they have
common essence rather there is a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-
cross relationship. He called it as family [Link] also held that logical necessity results
from linguistic convention and that rules cannot determine their own applications, that rule-
following presupposes the existence of regular practices.
In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein emphasized that there are countless different
uses of what we call “symbols,” “words,” and “sentences.” The task of philosophy is to gain a
crystal clear view of those multiple uses and thereby to dissolve philosophical and metaphysical
puzzles. These puzzles were the result of insufficient attention to the working of language and
could be resolved only by carefully retracing the linguistic steps by which they had been
reached.
Gilbert Ryle
Introduction
Gilbert Ryle was a British ordinary language philosopher. He made important contributions to
the philosophy of mind and his most important writings included Philosophical
Arguments (1945), The Concept of Mind (1949), Dilemmas (1954), Plato's Progress (1966)
and On Thinking (1979).
Part I: Misleading Propositions or Expressions
Gilbert Ryle accuses that expressions are often used not intelligently whereby the author as
well as the listener do not understand correctly, because there is no meaning in the utterances
they use. Non-philosophic authors do not know clearly; they only know dimly, foggily or
confusedly what the expressions mean. Philosophers know distinctly, clearly, and definitely. In
understanding expressions, of course some of the expressions need substitutes. For example, 1.
Words outside the grammar, 2. Foreign words, rare words, technical and trade terms, etc., 3.
Clumsy or unfamiliar phrases and 4. Equivocal phrases.
Again searching for paraphrases more intelligible for a given audience, looking for idiomatic
and stylish or more grammatically or etymologically correct words is called lexicography[1] or
 24

philology.[2] But yet Ryle feels that there is something philosophers can do regarding language
and meaning. Philosophers can, must discover and state what is really meant by expressions of
this or that sort. Why Ryle says this, is because there are many expressions which occur in non-
philosophical discourse which, though they are perfectly clearly understood by those who use
them and by those who hear or read them, are nevertheless couched in grammatical and
syntactical forms which are in a demonstrable way improper to the states of affair which they
record.
Therefore, propositions must be reformulated into expressions in which the syntactical form is
proper to the facts recorded. To know that the statement is true is to know that something is
the case. When an expression is of such a syntactical form that it is improper to the fact
recorded, it is systematically misleading in that it naturally suggests to some people – not
ordinary people – that the state of affair recorded is quite a different sort of state of affair from
that which it in fact is. These expressions are couched in syntactical form improper to the facts
recorded and proper to the facts of quite another logical form than the facts recorded. They are
misleading only – not senseless – not false – systematically because they mislead in the same
way for the same reason. There are three types of misleading propositions about which we shall
see below.
[Link]-Ontological Statement (not perfect ontological statements)
This is not purely ontological statement - (e.g) “God exists” – because Kant said that
“existence” is not quality. If existence is not quality, then it cannot be predicated of God, God
cannot be subject of predication of existence. We see the demonstration of how we arrive at the
confirmation that there are ontological propositions which are misleading. The demonstration
is done with the analysis of negative propositions. E.g. “Satan does not exist.” If there is no
Satan, then this statement about non-existence of Satan is improper and self-contradictory. If
we say, “Satan does not exist,” means it exists in some way, at least, to signify some sort of
attribute or character, i.e., the non-existence of it. So, the above-mentioned statement shows
that something may be, but not be in existence. Therefore, the proposition, “Satan does not
exist,” is self-contradictory and such a proposition should be dropped.
To say that quasi-ontological statements are misleading does not mean that they are false, not
even that they are equivocal or vague. The only thing regarding them is that the fact recorded
is misleading.
[Link]-Platonic Statements (Statements seemingly about universals)
Let us see the following propositions: “Unpunctuality is reprehensible” and “Virtue is its own
reward.” Let us also see the following: “John loves Catherine” and “Smith has given himself
reward.”
There are two types of propositions: particular and universal. We find in the first type of
propositions universal statements and in the second type particular ones. When we say,
“unpunctuality is reprehensible”, do we really mean that unpunctuality ought to be ashamed of
itself? No. Rather we mean that whoever is unpunctual deserves that other people should
reprove him for being unpunctual. Let us see again: whoever is unpunctual merits reproof.
 25

Whoever has the first attribute, also has the second attribute. In this way, all universal
statements are analysable and consequently general terms are never really the names of
subjects of attributes.
Universal is not object in the way a particular is object. They (universals) are not proper
objects. These universals are quasi-platonic ones. The statement, “honesty does so and so,” is
saying in a formally improper way the following: “whoever is honest does such and such.” This
statement says that something having one attribute necessitates its having the other. When
common man utters these propositions, he does not worry whether he makes any philosophical
mistakes. He understands the meaning of those statements. He will not desire for more proper
form of expression. For philosophers, this is misleading
[Link]-Descriptive Phrases (Misleading Descriptive Expressions)
A third class of systematically misleading expressions concerns sentences with “the” phrases, as
well as the “so and so” phrases. In many cases, these phrases are used “referentially” as
descriptions of a unique individual persons and things (definite descriptions). The examples are
as follows: “The King of England;” or “Tommy Jones is not the King of England.” But in some
statements they are used “non-referentially” and thus function as “quasi-descriptions.” For
example, “Poincaré is not the King of France,” “The present Vice-Chancellor of Oxford
University is a tall man," and “I have not seen the highest mountain in the world."
Philosophers can and do make mistakes in the accounts they give of what such descriptive
phrases mean. “The” or “so and so” phrases are misleading. These propositions behave
grammatically as if they were unique descriptions referring to individuals, when in fact they
are not referential phrases at all. For example, if “the King of France” were used referentially,
there would have to be an entity intended as its denotation, but there is none in actual sense.
So, definite descriptions are systematically misleading expressions. There are many ways in
which quasi-descriptions are misleading. One important way is that descriptive descriptions in
some cases do not designate any particular object outside there. It is not intended that there be
a “meaning” in the way that there is a person about whom it is asserted, for example, “Our
village policeman is fond of football.” In the above given example, the description, “our village
policeman” is not proper noun in strict sense. People wrongly think that descriptive statements
are proper names.
Therefore, the meaning of descriptive propositions is to be established. In order to do that,
descriptions must be divided into its constituting smaller propositions and establish the
meaning of each, so as to establish the meaning of the whole of the description. Let us observe
how it works in the following description:
“Tommy, the eldest son of Jones was married today.”
Its atomic propositions are: 1. Tommy is son of Jones; 2. He is the eldest son; and 3. He is
married today.
The statement, “Tommy, the eldest son of Jones was married today” cannot be true unless the
three or more other statements are true. All we must know is that someone or other must be so
characterized for the whole statement to be true.
 26

To enable the statement valid, we should know the subject or the name and the description. If
we do not know these things, we do not know that the quasi-unique description describes any
one. But we can understand the statement – the statement in which quasi-name and quasi-
unique description occur, for we know what would be the case if someone were so called, and so
describable.
Descriptive propositions do not in any sense means this person or that thing. We can know and
understand the statement containing the descriptive phrase and still not know of the subject of
attributes or of that one that the description fits. This is again misleading proposition. There is
not anything wrong in the statement, but fact recorded is different one. The errors Ryle wants
to dispel are: 1) the view that descriptive phrases are proper names; 2) the view that the thing
which a description describes is what the description means.
Conclusion
Firstly, Ryle says that all the above-mentioned expressions mislead in the same direction. They
suggest the existence of new sorts of subjects. They are temptations to multiply entities. In all
these, the denoting expressions do not in fact denote anything. They only took grammatically
like expressions which are used to denote. What Ryle is trying to establish is:
- that what is expressed in one expression can often be expressed in expressions of quite
different grammatical forms.
- that of two expressions, each meaning what the other means, which are of different
grammatical forms, one is often more systematically misleading than the other.
That means one and the same state of affair can be recorded on an indefinite number of
statements of widely differing grammatical forms always better represented by some than
others.
The ideal is that propositions should be stated in a completely non-misleading form of words.
Now the question is who can do this? We can answer that only a philosopher can find the best
way of recording the state of affair or fact. It is hard to explain how in the genesis of language
non-philosophers could have decided on the dedication of a given grammatical form to facts of
a given logical form. Ryle views that the propriety or suitableness of grammatical to logical
forms is more nearly conventional than natural. Secondly he answers the question: how are we
to discover particular cases whether an expression is systematically misleading? People use
language conventionally rather than exhibiting the forms of the facts recorded. philosophical
abstract thinking is always misled by systematically misleading expressions, and even
philosophical abstract thinking is actually a victim of this misleading expressions. Philosophy
has to cure this disease.
Philosophy must then involve the exercise of systematic restatement. Here the restatement is
not the substitution of one noun for another or one verb for another. That is what
lexicographers and translators do. Its restatements are transmutations of syntax controlled not
by desire for elegance or stylistic correctness, but by desire to exhibit the forms of the facts
onto which philosophy is the enquiry. So philosophy has to enquire what the real form of fact is
recorded, when this is concealed by the expression in question. We can always state or record
 27

correct fact by a new form of words which does exhibit what the other failed to exhibit. This is
the philosophical analysis for Ryle. This is the sole and whole function of philosophy.
Part II: Ryle on Category Mistake and Cartesian Dualism
Ryle maintained that philosophy was not in the business of discovering new empirical truths
but of rearranging our language, or at least analyzing it, so as to display its correct logical form
or real meaning. This was to be done, in Ryle's view, by excising or at least having our attention
drawn to pseudo-referring expressions, category mistakes, and the incorrect use of various
words, phrases and sentences.
Ryle launches an attack on dualism at the beginning of The Concept of Mind. The first and
most influential chapter of this famous book is titled "Descartes' Myth." The myth that Ryle
attributes to dualists he calls "with deliberate abusiveness" the myth of "the ghost in the
machine". The machine is the human body. The ghost is the human mind. "Ghost," of course,
is meant to suggest something spooky, and something that isn't really there. Etymologically
Ryle's coinage is clever, as the English word "ghost" is related to German "Geist," which
means mind or spirit. Ryle's point is that the mind is not a thing; not a substance in the
philosophical sense. Our bodies are things, material things, but our minds are not things, not
immaterial things, not anything. We are misled into assuming that minds are things by our
language. Since we have the noun "mind" we assume that it stands for a thing. There's that
pervasive error again of assuming that a word must stand for a thing. The error is deepened
when we suppose that since it cannot be a material thing that obeys physical laws, the mind
must be an immaterial thing that is free of physical causation.
Ryle claims that this mistake - taking the mind for a thing - is an example of a fundamental
type of confusion that he calls a category mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they
belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually
belong to another.
Ryle does not want to deny the fact that people think, have feelings, sensations, get ideas in
their heads, and so on. When we use mental terms such as "intelligent," "thoughtful,"
"clever," "insightful," and so on to describe actions or speeches, we are describing the ways in
which the overt acts and utterances are done. Just as the university is the organization of the
classrooms, lectures, faculty, dorms, administration, and so on, and not a separate thing, our
minds are not separate things, but are the organization of our behaviour. Mental terms refer to
ways of behaving.
Mental terms are conceptually grounded in behaviour and behavioural dispositions. This is
called, logical behaviourism. The mental terms are descriptions of behaviour and dispositions
to behave. When we characterize people by mental predicates, we are describing the ways in
which those people conduct parts of their predominantly public behaviour.
Strawson says that behaviourism of the sort Ryle is arguing for has the advantage that it avoids
the scepticism inherent in dualism. The appeal of behavioural meanings for mental terms is
that mental terms are nothing but a system of behaviour; and that system is observable. If
mental terms refer to private inner mental occurrences, we are stuck in the problem of other
 28

minds, and consequently dualism. With dualism we cannot avoid scepticism about other people
and their minds.
Part III: The Distinction between Knowing-how and· Knowing-that
Traditional doctrines contain that intelligence (theory) is distinct from action (practice). It says
that intelligence does not influence action. Intelligence is expressed in regulative propositions
such as: I know the car is red. And practice is expressed not in regulative proposition, but it
effects an action such as: I know how to ride bike. For Ryle this distinction is false.
Ryle argues that intelligence and action are not two different things, but it is one and the same
and he establishes that intelligence is directly exercised. It is not ‘intelligence and
‘performance,’ but “Intelligent Performance.” Intelligent performance does not need act of
contemplating regulative propositions. But traditional theorists say that there is gap between
these two. For Ryle, there is no middle ground too or “go-between” faculty, i.e., one that
mediates between intelligence and practice.
The “go-between’ faculty is not tenable. Generally the “go-between” faculty has to do two
things: a. It must be able to influence action; b. It should be amenable to regulative
propositions. Thus, tripartite system emerges between (a) faculty of intelligence that
contemplates but does not execute action, (b) faculty of action that executes but does not
contemplate, and (c) faculty of “go-between” that reconciles the irreconcilables. This is an
infinite regress according to Ryle.
The tradition supports the dualistic theory. It is guilty of type-mistake, in that it believes that
an adverb adds something else to the action. Or in other words, an adverb expresses the
intelligent part of the action in question. For example, see the following:
I did efficiently – he read fluently
For Ryle, this is nothing but “modus operandi” (node of operating or doing) of the particular
action. “To dance either gracefully or clumsily” is the way in which the motion is done. It does
not refer to any special intelligence.
Ryle establishes two things: (Theory can also be understood as “knowledge-that” practice as
“knowledge-how)
a. knowledge-how (practice) cannot be defined in terms of knowledge-that (theory)
b. knowledge-how is a concept logically prior to knowledge-that
Let us see the first establishment. The thesis can be explained by the following analogy. If
“knowledge-how” is the one which guides the “knowledge-that,” a chess master would be able
to teach stupid chess. He will teach how to play and how to play cleverly. But in reality, it is not
the case. It is not easy to teach someone the fact about the chess game and make him play
efficiently. It means it requires intelligence not only to discover truths, but also to put it into
practice. In other words, knowing a rule (knowing that) is to put it into practice (knowing
how). Knowing a set of rules for something (like how to act morally) does not necessarily mean
that one knows how to do something cleverly.
 29

The second establishment says that we actually formulate propositions or rules through what
we do. In this sense, rules are not prior; rather practice is prior to rules. The mistake of the
traditionalists is that they say or equate rational behaviour with internal system (attributed to
some sort of entity) of reasoning such as, judging, reflecting etc. We cannot do that because
even the same person can argue foolishly and cleverly. Ryle’s contention is that the intelligent
application of rules normally does occur without consideration of them in theory. Does one
study the laws of motion of Aristotle and Newton before driving? No, it is not the case. Actions
do not revert to theory for wisdom.
Moreover, we can extract principles form actions. That does not mean that rules after having
drawn from practice are in indicative mood or imperative class or they belong to manual for
actions. Knowing how to behave is expressed in correct behaviour, not in propositions or
prescriptions.
Does knowledge of cooking make someone cook? Knowledge-how cannot be built on
knowledge-that. Knowledge is not imparted, but inculcated. Knowledge is knowledge-how, not
knowledge-that. The advance of knowledge is not what you have accumulated, but the mastery
of methods. Any operation is either intelligent or unintelligent operation. The intelligence is
already there in the operation itself.
Criticism
Ryle's distinction between "knowing-how" and "knowing-that" raises certain questions, which
imply that dualism cannot be demolished. In all cases of “knowing-how”, there is reference to
activities as well as to rules of those activities. A disposition is equally a disposition to act in a
certain way and a disposition to reflect on the act. Ryle wrongly thinks that observance of rules
in intelligent actions is the same as acting intelligently. Ryle himself admits that overt actions
themselves do not indicate intelligence of a particular action:
The one cardinal feature of intelligent performance is that the individual reasons logically, that
is, he avoids fallacies and provides valid proofs and inferences pertinent to the case he is
making [...] but he probably observes the rules of logic without thinking of them.[3]
Ryle's analysis regarding mental-conduct concepts follows that his analysis couldn't be
divorced from empirical considerations. When he rejects some accounts of a concept and
appeals to what one would say or how we would behave, he is appealing to facts. To take an
example from The Concept of Mind, where Ryle deals with the intellect, he argues against the
doctrine that knowledge is primarily "Knowing-that" or factual knowledge, and that
"Knowing-how" is subordinated to "Knowledge-that".
Ryle has tried to draw a non-parallelism between the two kinds of knowing. Ryle considers
“knowing-how” as higher than “knowing-that.” It itself shows that there is distinction between
these two.
The distinction between the ‘disposition to act’ and ‘to act actually’ is definitely there. This
distinction suggests that the disposition should mean something more than overt behaviour. If
it suggests something more, then it must be private. So Ryle's attempt to one world theory does
not appear to be an easy task.
 30

J.L. Austin: Theory of Speech Acts

Introduction
Speech act theory believes in identifying utterances and terms as actual actions. This theory
not only considers language used by the speaker but studies change in the state of behavior of
the speaker as well as the listener at the time of communication. A speech act in linguistic and
the philosophy of language not only presents information, but also performs an action as well.
Although a speech act is concerned with the ‘performative’ aspect of utterances, a speech act
has many other dimensions. According to speech act, language is used to make things happen.
Or in other words, an action is performed by means of language.
All utterances in a speech situation perform some kind of ‘act’ like commanding, asking,
requesting, stating or committing. The study of speech acts enables the understanding of the
social, psychological, cultural, historical and similar other dimensions of communication. They
are not mere artificial linguistic constructs as it may seem, their understanding together with
the acquaintance of context in which they are performed are often essential for decoding the
whole utterance and its proper meaning.
A speaker does not merely express meaning, but also expresses an attitude. This attitude is not
an attitude of an individual but of a tradition. For example, the attitude of humanity is
expressed in the use of words like ‘please’ in an utterance performing the function of a request.
A sense of warning is inherent in words like ‘take care’ or ‘watch out’. The speaker ‘uses’ these
words to convey both, meaning and attitude. Thus, it can be said that meaning and usage are
interrelated.
Requesting, promising, warning, challenging, judging, asserting, and so on are different
communicative strategies that perform various functions. According to linguists, they are
called speech acts. Speech act theory analyzes communicative strategies or speech acts from the
perspective of their functions. Austin added performative functional dimension to language or
communication. According to Austin, communication has to be treated like a performance.
Constatives and Performatives
J. L. Austin comes up with a new category of utterances – the constatives and performatives.
The notions of constatives and performatives are central to the speech act theory.
Constatives
Constatives are simply statements or assertions. Constatives describe truth and falsity.
Constatives depend on the facts, and can only be judged with reference to them. Constatives
are divided into assertives, predicatives, descriptives, ascriptives, informatives, confirmatives,
disputatives, responsives, suggetsives, suppositives and the like. A constative utterance
performs the following functions:
a. It conveys a message; b. That message can be compared to the real world and declared to be
true or false; c. A failed constative is false, unclear, or void of reference.
The examples of successful constative utterances are as follows:
 31

a. Jesus was born in Bethlehem and there was a special star in the sky to announce his birth.
b. It is in simmakkal that we bought our computer
Performatives
A performative is as an utterance which contains a special type of verb in it, which is called as
a performative verb, by force of which it performs an action. In other words, in using a
performative, a person is not just saying something but is actually doing something. A
performative, unlike a constative, cannot be true or false; it can only be felicitous or infelicitous
(happy or appropriate and unhappy or inappropriate) and it does not describe, report or
constate anything. For example, when people say, “I promise to do so and so,” they are
generating the action of making a promise. In this case, without any flaw (the promise is
fulfilled), the performative utterance is felicitous; if on the other hand, one fails to do what he
or she promised, it can be infelicitous.
Following are the examples of successful performatives:
I am not coming; I accept your challenge, etc,.
The characteristic feature of the performative utterance, in contrast to the constative, is that it
does not describe a state of affairs independent of itself, it describes reality itself. It is,
therefore, a self-reflexive utterance. The acts of naming, marrying, bequeathing and betting are
the classical examples of performatives given by Austin. The performative is therefore, in the
most exact sense, an act and not a representation of something else.
The Locutionary, Illocutionary and Perlocutionary Speech Acts
Austin (1965) introduced the terminologies, locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.
The locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are, in fact, three basic components with
the help of which a speech act is formed. This can be demonstrated with the help of a simple
example: ‘Would you close the door, please?’
The surface form, and also the locutionary act, of this utterance is a question with a clear
content (Close the door.) The illocutionary act conveys a request from the part of the speaker
expressed in the interrogative form and the perlocutionary act expresses the speaker’s desire
that the hearer should go and close the door.
The locutionary act can be viewed as a mere uttering of some words in a certain language,
while the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts convey a more complicated message for the
hearer. An illocutionary act communicates the speaker’s intentions behind the locution and a
perlocutionary act reveals the effect the speaker wants to exercise over the hearer. We will
come back to another example after going through each of these constituent acts.
Locutionary Acts
According to Austin, a locutionary act is an act where the speaker says something and
produces certain noise or utters words in proper order that must carry meaning, sense and
reference with them. Here, grammar and phonetics play a vital role. According to him a
locutionary act i.e. the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic
 32

and rhetic acts correspond to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful
utterance.
Austin’s idea of locutionary act involves:
1. To perform the act of uttering certain noises (a phonetic act).
2. To perform the act of uttering certain vocables or words
( a phatic act – pertains to words).
3. To perform the act of using that sentence or its constituents with a certain more or less
definite ‘sense’ and a more or less definite ‘reference’, which together are equivalent to
‘meaning’ (rhetic act).
e.g. This is a red rose.
Illocutionary Acts
Illocutionary acts are considered as the core of the theory of speech acts. As already suggested
above, an illocutionary act is the action performed by the speaker in producing a given
utterance. The illocutionary act is closely connected with speaker’s intentions, e.g. stating,
questioning, promising, requesting, and giving commands, threatening and many others.
Austin (1965) observed:
“Illocutionary act is an act, which is uttered by the speaker with intention, by keeping motive in
mind. It includes asking or answering a question, giving information, warning, announcing a
verdict, or an intention pronouncing sentence, appointing, appealing, criticizing, describing, and
many more suggestions.” (How to Do Things with Words)
The illocutionary force of utterance is a phonological utterance with an intention while
expressing it. This is the act, which is governed by culture and with illocutionary force behind
it. If a speaker utters, ‘It’s too hot here.’ s/he accepts the hearer to do a certain action like
bringing a glass of water or switching on the fan. The force behind the illocutionary act is a
request.
e.g. I promise that I will marry you.
Perlocutionary Acts
Perlocutionary acts, Austin’s last element in the three-fold definition of speech acts, are
performed with the intention of producing a further effect on the hearer. It is an act having an
effect on those who hear a meaningful utterance. For instance, by telling a ghost story at night
one may accomplish the cruel perlocutionary act of frightening a child.
e.g. Let the present cursed government not continue next time.
Perlocutionary act convinces the audience or reader to take some kind of action. According to
Austin, communication is a process either illocutionary or perlocutionary. Perlocutionary effect
is a sequence to illocutionary action. Sometimes it may seem that perlocutionary acts do not
differ from illocutionary acts very much, yet there is one important feature which tells that
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perlocutionary act is different from illocutionary act. We understand this from the following
elucidation.
There are two levels of success in performing illocutionary and perlocutionary acts which can
be best explained with a simple example:
‘Would you close the door?’
Considered merely as an illocutionary act (a request in this case), the act is successful if the
hearer recognizes that he should close the door, but as a perlocutionary act it succeeds only if
he actually closes it. This is where perlocutionary differ from illocutionary.
There are many utterances with the purpose to affect the hearer in some way or other, some
convey the information directly, others are more careful or polite and they use indirectness to
transmit the message.
The three aspects of speech acts can also be seen as follows:
The first aspect conveys the truth value of the uttered words. Second aspect of the utterance
counts the force behind the utterance, what’s actual/ hidden intention behind the utterance.
The third aspect of meaning of the utterance will have effects or consequences on the hearer.
This can again be demonstrated by the following example:
Take the bus, don’t drive
Here the locutionary act is: I said something that meant, “Take the bus, don’t drive.”
Illocutionary act is: “I advised or suggested or recommended taking the bus.”
Perlocutionary act is: “I persuaded someone to take the bus (assuming s/he acted on my advice,
suggestion or recommendation).”
To conclude
Austin’s terms and distinctions have become part of the philosophical heritage of analytical
philosophy. The notion of speech act is widely used outside of philosophy in linguistics, social
sciences, and literary criticism.