PROPOSITIONS AND FACTS WITH MORE THAN ONE VERB: BELIEFS, ETC

You will remember that after speaking about atomic proposi-tions I pointed out two more complicated forms of proposiproposi-tions which arise immediately on proceeding further than that: the first, which I call molecular propositions, which I dealt with last time, involving such words as “or”, “and”, “if”, and the second involving two or more verbs such as believing, wishing, willing, and so forth. In the case of molecular propositions it was not clear that we had to deal with any new form of fact, but only with a new form of proposition, i.e. if you have a disjunctive proposition such as “p or q” it does not seem very plausible to say that there is in the world a disjunctive fact corresponding to

“p or q” but merely that there is a fact corresponding to p and a fact corresponding to q, and the disjunctive proposition derives its truth or falsehood from those two separate facts. Therefore in that case one was dealing only with a new form of proposition and not with a new form of fact. Today we have to deal with a new form of fact.

I think one might describe philosophical logic, the philo-sophical portion of logic which is the portion that I am concerned with in these lectures since Christmas (1917), as an inventory, or if you like a more humble word, a “zoo” containing all the different forms that facts may have. I should prefer to say “forms of facts” rather than “forms of propositions”. To apply that to the case of molecular propositions which I dealt with last time, if one were pursuing this analysis of the forms of facts, it would be belief in a molecular proposition that one would deal with rather than the molecular proposition itself. In accordance with the sort of realistic bias that I should put into all study of metaphysics, I

should always wish to be engaged in the investigation of some actual fact or set of facts, and it seems to me that that is so in logic just as much as it is in zoology. In logic you are concerned with the forms of facts, with getting hold of the different sorts of facts, different logical sorts of facts, that there are in the world.

Now I want to point out today that the facts that occur when one believes or wishes or wills have a different logical form from the atomic facts containing a single verb which I dealt with in my second lecture. (There are, of course, a good many forms that facts may have, a strictly infinite number, and I do not wish you to suppose that I pretend to deal with all of them.) Suppose you take any actual occurrence of a belief. I want you to understand that I am not talking about beliefs in the sort of way in which judgment is spoken of in theory of knowledge, in which you would say there is the judgment that two and two are four. I am talking of the actual occurrence of a belief in a particular per-son’s mind at a particular moment, and discussing what sort of a fact that is. If I say “What day of the week is this?” and you say

“Tuesday”, there occurs in your mind at that moment the belief that this is Tuesday. The thing I want to deal with today is the question: What is the form of the fact which occurs when a person has a belief? Of course you see that the sort of obvious first notion that one would naturally arrive at would be that a belief is a relation to the proposition. “I believe the proposition p.” “I believe that today is Tuesday.” “I believe that two and two are four.” Something like that. It seems on the face of it as if you had there a relation of the believing subject to a proposition.

That view won’t do for various reasons which I shall go into. But you have, therefore, got to have a theory of belief which is not exactly that. Take any sort of proposition, say “I believe Socrates is mortal”. Suppose that that belief does actually occur. The statement that it occurs is a statement of fact. You have there two verbs. You may have more than two verbs, you may have any number greater than one. I may believe that Jones is of the

opinion that Socrates is mortal. There you have more than two verbs. You may have any number, but you cannot have less than two. You will perceive that it is not only the proposition that has the two verbs, but also the fact, which is expressed by the proposition, has two constituents corresponding to verbs. I shall call those constituents verbs for the sake of shortness, as it is very difficult to find any word to describe all those objects which one denotes by verbs. Of course, that is strictly using the word

“verb” in two different senses, but I do not think it can lead to any confusion if you understand that it is being so used. This fact (the belief) is one fact. It is not like what you had in molecular propositions where you had (say) “p or q”. It is just one single fact that you have a belief. That is obvious from the fact that you can believe a falsehood. It is obvious from the fact of false belief that you cannot cut off one part: you cannot have

I believe/Socrates is mortal.

There are certain questions that arise about such facts, and the first that arises is, Are they undeniable facts or can you reduce them in some way to relations of other facts? Is it really necessary to suppose that there are irreducible facts, of which that sort of thing is a verbal expression? On that question until fairly lately I should certainly not have supposed that any doubt could arise.

It had not really seemed to me until fairly lately that that was a debatable point. I still believe that there are facts of that form, but I see that it is a substantial question that needs to be discussed.

1. Are beliefs, etc., irreducible facts?

“Etc.” covers understanding a proposition; it covers desiring, willing, any other attitude of that sort that you may think of that involves a proposition. It seems natural to say one believes a proposition and unnatural to say one desires a proposition, but

as a matter of fact that is only a prejudice. What you believe and what you desire are of exactly the same nature. You may desire to get some sugar tomorrow and of course you may possibly believe that you will. I am not sure that the logical form is the same in the case of will. I am inclined to think that the case of will is more analogous to that of perception, in going direct to facts, and excluding the possibility of falsehood. In any case desire and belief are of exactly the same form logically.

Pragmatists and some of the American realists, the school whom one calls neutral monists, deny altogether that there is such a phenomenon as belief in the sense I am dealing with.

They do not deny it in words, they do not use the same sort of language that I am using, and that makes it difficult to compare their views with the views I am speaking about. One has really to translate what they say into language more or less analogous to ours before one can make out where the points of contact or difference are. If you take the works of James in his Essays in Radical Empiricism or Dewey in his Essays in Experimental Logic you will find that they are denying altogether that there is such a phenomenon as belief in the sense I am talking of. They use the word “believe”

but they mean something different. You come to the view called

“behaviourism”, according to which you mean, if you say a person believes a thing, that he behaves in a certain fashion; and that hangs together with James’s pragmatism. James and Dewey would say: when I believe a proposition, that means that I act in a certain fashion, that my behaviour has certain characteristics, and my belief is a true one if the behaviour leads to the desired result and is a false one if it does not. That, if it is true, makes their pragmatism a perfectly rational account of truth and falsehood, if you do accept their view that belief as an isolated phenomenon does not occur. That is therefore the first thing one has to consider. It would take me too far from logic to consider that subject as it deserves to be considered, because it is a subject belonging to psychology, and it is only relevant to logic in this

one way that it raises a doubt whether there are any facts having the logical form that I am speaking of. In the question of this logical form that involves two or more verbs you have a curious interlacing of logic with empirical studies, and of course that may occur elsewhere, in this way, that an empirical study gives you an example of a thing having a certain logical form, and you cannot really be sure that there are things having a given logical form except by finding an example, and the finding of an example is itself empirical. Therefore in that way empirical facts are relevant to logic at certain points. I think theoretically one might know that there were those forms without knowing any instance of them, but practically, situated as we are, that does not seem to occur. Practically, unless you can find an example of the form you won’t know that there is that form. If I cannot find an example containing two or more verbs, you will not have reason to believe in the theory that such a form occurs.

When you read the words of people like James and Dewey on the subject of belief, one thing that strikes you at once is that the sort of thing they are thinking of as the object of belief is quite different from the sort of thing I am thinking of. They think of it always as a thing. They think you believe in God or Homer: you believe in an object. That is the picture thay have in their minds. It is common enough, in common parlance, to talk that way, and they would say, the first crude approximation that they would suggest would be that you believe truly when there is such an object and that you believe falsely when there is not. I do not mean they would say that exactly, but that would be the crude view from which they would start. They do not seem to have grasped the fact that the objective side in belief is better expressed by a proposition than by a single word, and that, I think, has a great deal to do with their whole outlook on the matter of what belief consists of. The object of belief in their view is generally, not relations between things, or things having qualities, or what not, but just single things which may or

may not exist. That view seems to me radically and absolutely mistaken. In the first place there are a great many judgments you cannot possibly fit into that scheme, and in the second place it cannot possibly give any explanation to false beliefs, because when you believe that a thing exists and it does not exist, the thing is not there, it is nothing, and it cannot be the right analy-sis of a false belief to regard it as a relation to what is really nothing. This is an objection to supposing that belief consists simply in relation to the object. It is obvious that if you say “I believe in Homer” and there was no such person as Homer, your belief cannot be a relation to Homer, since there is no “Homer”.

Every fact that occurs in the world must be composed entirely of constituents that there are, and not of constituents that there are not. Therefore when you say “I believe in Homer” it cannot be the right analysis of the thing to put it like that. What the right analysis is I shall come on to in the theory of descriptions. I come back now to the theory of behaviourism which I spoke of a moment ago. Suppose, e.g., that you are said to believe that there is a train at 10.25. This means, we are told, that you start for the station at a certain time. When you reach the station you see it is 10.24 and you run. That behaviour constitutes your belief that there is a train at that time. If you catch your train by running, your belief was true. If the train went at 10.23, you miss it, and your belief was false. That is the sort of thing that they would say constitutes belief. There is not a single state of mind which consists in contemplating this eternal verity, that the train starts at 10.25. They would apply that even to the most abstract things. I do not myself feel that that view of things is tenable. It is a difficult one to refute because it goes very deep and one has the feeling that perhaps, if one thought it out long enough and became sufficiently aware of all its implications, one might find after all that it was a feasible view; but yet I do not feel it feasible. It hangs together, of course, with the theory of neutral monism, with the theory that the material constituting the

mental is the same as the material constituting the physical, just like the Post Office directory which gives you people arranged geographically and alphabetically. This whole theory hangs together with that. I do not mean necessarily that all the people that profess the one profess the other, but that the two do essen-tially belong together. If you are going to take that view, you have to explain away belief and desire, because things of that sort do seem to be mental phenomena. They do seem rather far removed from the sort of thing that happens in the physical world. Therefore people will set to work to explain away such things as belief, and reduce them to bodily behaviour; and your belief in a certain proposition will consist in the behaviour of your body. In the crudest terms that is what that view amounts to. It does enable you to get on very well without mind. Truth and falsehood in that case consist in the relation of your bodily behaviour to a certain fact, the sort of distant fact which is the purpose of your behaviour, as it were, and when your behaviour is satisfactory in regard to that fact your belief is true, and when your behaviour is unsatisfactory in regard to that fact your belief is false. The logical essence, in that view, will be a relation between two facts having the same sort of form as a causal relation, i.e. on the one hand there will be your bodily behaviour which is one fact, and on the other hand the fact that the train starts at such and such a time, which is another fact, and out of a relation of those two the whole phenomenon is constituted. The thing you will get will be logically of the same form as you have in cause, where you have “This fact causes that fact”. It is quite a different logical form from the facts containing two verbs that I am talking of today.

I have naturally a bias in favour of the theory of neutral monism because it exemplifies Occam’s Razor. I always wish to get on in philosophy with the smallest possible apparatus, partly because it diminishes the risk of error, because it is not necessary to deny the entities you do not assert, and therefore you run less

risk of error the fewer entities you assume. The other reason—

perhaps a somewhat frivolous one—is that every diminution in the number of entities increases the amount of work for mathematical logic to do in building up things that look like the entities you used to assume. Therefore the whole theory of neutral monism is pleasing to me, but I do find so far very great difficulty in believing it. You will find a discussion of the whole question in some articles I wrote in The Monist,⁵ especially in July 1914, and in the two previous numbers also. I should really want to rewrite them rather because I think some of the arguments I used against neutral monism are not valid. I place most reliance on the argument about “emphatic particulars”, “this”, “I”, all that class of words, that pick out certain particulars from the universe by their relation to oneself, and I think by the fact that they, or particulars related to them, are present to you at the moment of speaking. “This”, of course, is what I call an “emphatic particular”. It is simply a proper name for the present object of attention, a proper name, meaning nothing. It is ambiguous, because, of course, the object of attention is always changing from moment to moment and from person to person. I think it is extremely difficult, if you get rid of consciousness altogether, to explain what you mean by such a word as “this”, what it is that makes the absence of impartiality. You would say that in a purely physical world there would be a complete impartiality.

All parts of time and all regions of space would seem equally emphatic. But what really happens is that we pick out certain facts, past and future and all that sort of thing; they all radiate out from “this”, and I have not myself seen how one can deal with the notion of “this” on the basis of neutral monism. I do not lay that down dogmatically, only I do not see how it can be done. I shall assume for the rest of this lecture that there are such facts as

5[Reprinted as “On the Nature of Acquaintance” in R. C. Marsh ed., Logic and Knowledge.]

beliefs and wishes and so forth. It would take me really the whole of my course to go into the question fully. Thus we come back to more purely logical questions from this excursion into psychology, for which I apologize.

2. What is the status of p in “I believe p”?

You cannot say that you believe facts, because your beliefs are sometimes wrong. You can say that you perceive facts, because perceiving is not liable to error. Wherever it is facts alone that

You cannot say that you believe facts, because your beliefs are sometimes wrong. You can say that you perceive facts, because perceiving is not liable to error. Wherever it is facts alone that