
What people get wrong about Bertrand Russell - lermontov
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/what-people-get-wrong-about-bertrand-russell-philosophy-logic
======
anaphor
As someone who took a few university courses on analytic philosophy covering
Russell, I've never heard anyone suggest he "sold out". Maybe that's just
people who aren't really familiar with Russell or his personal life that say
that?

If you're going to argue that he wrote sellout books, then he did that long
before he gave up on logicism. See for example Introduction to Mathematical
Philosophy, which is aimed at people who know nothing above regular public
school math.

I think the ability to recognize that he had basically hit a dead end with
logicism was probably his greatest success, instead of falling prey to a sunk-
cost fallacy. The guy wrote one of the most influential papers in philosophy
of the 20th century ("On Denoting"), as well as being one of the central
figures in the founding of an entire field of study, but he knew when to call
it quits, and I doubt he regretted it at all. His social and political
writings and activism are a treasure trove of wisdom IMHO.

Edit: if I'm being fair though, it is pretty common for people to say History
of Western Philosophy was a bit of a poor work that he did just because it
would sell well. That is just one book out of hundreds of works though, and
honestly it's not _that_ bad if you balance it with more neutral sources on
some of the material.

~~~
ChrisSD
I don't think _History of Western Philosophy_ is bad but it is opinionated. If
someone were expecting either a dispassionate overview or heartfelt enthusiasm
for all philosophers past I can see how they'd come away disappointed.
Especially when he's particularly dismissive.

If you go in expecting Russell's view of Western philosophy through the ages
then you'll get just that.

~~~
mellosouls
_History_ is a terrific book. Whatever its flaws, it's a great read, and often
very witty.

Wasn't it based on lectures?

~~~
shantly
Since he’s up-front that he’s gonna be including opinion, and about his own
limitations when it comes to presenting certain philosophies (IIRC for Bergson
he was like “look I can’t figure out a way to explain this that doesn’t seem
like total bullshit, but I’ll try”) I don’t really get the complaints about
the book. I think it’s great. Why would you want Bertrand Russell to write
such a book and _not_ provide his analyses? It’s better that way! There are
plenty of similar works by people mainly known for writing their histories of
philosophy. Go for those if you want a just-the-facts version.

~~~
logjammin
Agreed. I'm much more comfortable with "this is my take on this subject, and
here's how I'm a bit biased, but I'll try anyway to be as objective as I can
as well" than "this is the way things are"-style proclamations.

------
amarte
As a side note since this discussion is related to Russell and his brilliant
contributions, I think a similar discussion can be had regarding Russell's
contemporary and co-author Alfred North Whitehead (mentioned breifly in the
article).

If Russell can be charged with "selling out" or directing his work toward a
more general audience, Whitehead can be accused of the opposite, or perhaps
even worse. If you read into his works post Principia (which he co-authored
with Russell) you find a brilliant logician and philosopher begin to deviate
from commonly held assumptions of Western thought and attempt to articulate a
philosophy often at odds with "objective" ways of thinking. His works are
interesting yet difficult because he is often so at odds with 20th century
science and philosophy that he has to create his own terms to describe
phenomena, which he builds upon with increasingly unfamiliar terminology until
most readers feel completely alienated and give up.

Imo both Russell and Whitehead were great minds and deserve their fair share
of consideration and contemplation, pre- and post- Principia.

~~~
lordgrenville
Apropos AN Whitehead, I listened to an interesting talk the other week [1]
about "process philosophy", specifically in phil of biology. The speaker (John
Dupré) thought that he was working along the same lines as Whitehead, but that
he was a poor writer so no-one can _really_ be sure if they understood him.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhczxmLkGHI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhczxmLkGHI)

------
wry_discontent
If you're interested in Russell, or mathematics in general, I can't recommend
the graphic novel Logicomix highly enough. It's about Russell and the
Principia Mathematica

~~~
idoubtit
As a former mathematician, I totally disagree.

Logicomix has nearly no mathematical content. The most technical part is a
quick description of Hilbert's Hotel, but I thought it was very shallow, since
there was no explanation. It did not even try to define infinity, or suggest
how to distinguish several kinds of infinity. And, at least in the French
edition, the Barber Paradox is wrongly stated!

Logicomix is mostly about people, especially Russell, with the postulate that
everyone that worked on the foundations of logic was insane. But if you
scrutinize the story, many details are wrong (IIRC, the young years of Russel,
Frege's aggressive bursts, the last years of Cantor, …). They bent the reality
to obtain the cliché that most people expected: genius mathematicians are mad.

~~~
anaphor
I agree, the graphic novel was entertaining, but not an accurate portrayal of
their lives.

If you're looking for something more factual, then Russell's own autobiography
is a good place to start. Also "The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell"
(edited by Nicholas Griffin) is a source I can vouch for.

[https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Companion-Bertrand-
Companio...](https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Companion-Bertrand-Companions-
Philosophy/dp/0521636345)

------
dr_dshiv
>Arguably Russell saw the limitations of “technical philosophy” more clearly
than those who thought of themselves as following in his footsteps. The
analytic tradition has produced some great work but too many of its
practitioners have conflated rigour with technical argument. I would wager
that there is not a single major work of political or moral philosophy which
depends on a formal logical proof. What endures of Russell’s logic is of
interest only in logic. If Russell wanted to address the problems of real
life, he had to leave behind the symbols and numbers that had so captivated
him in his youth.

What are the shortcomings of logic? Just incompleteness, or is there more?

~~~
pure-awesome
I'd say the major shortcoming of logic is its inability to express
uncertainty.

It's well-suited for mathematical proof as practiced, where axioms and
definitions are precisely defined, and there is no reliance on empirical
observation with potentially noisy data.

However, most of real-life is not as clear-cut. Deriving the truth of a
statement may depend on multiple potentially faulty pieces of evidence which
must be taken into account together. For this, one needs to assign
probabilities.

This is useful even when applied back to mathematics. In practice,
mathematicians form conjectures "likely to be true" long before they are
formally proven. Additionally, they must narrow the search space in their
minds in order to try the most likely avenues of proof, a process we refer to
as "creativity".

Even using probability is only one more step towards solving the question of
formally codifying general reasoning. We must also consider factors such as
use of language and forming concepts (what precisely IS a "chair", after
all?), and further aspects which form a basis for human action and which
cannot be logically derived, namely our morality and base goals. Not to
mention the entire plethora of such questions with which the field of
philosophy concerns itself.

(These are the types of questions to which we will need to find some answer if
we are ever to construct a useful generally reasoning AI)

Much as classical Newtonian mechanics is a useful approximation of physics at
large scales and low speeds, formal logic is a useful approximation of
reasoning at high certainty and low flexibility of interpretation.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I'd say the major shortcoming of logic is its inability to express
> uncertainty.

There are formal logics that incorporate uncertainty, non-crisp truth values,
or both.

~~~
pure-awesome
Indeed! I was speaking somewhat imprecisely - I was referring to logic in the
sense of Bertrand Russel's work. I should rather say the major shortcoming of
CLASSICAL logic is its inability to express uncertainty.

That being said, there are many flavours of non-classical logic and
(paraconsistent, multivalued etc.) but their usage remains scarce outside of
work in logic itself. Some intuitionistic, constructivist, and computational
logics seem to be gaining popularity, especially in computer-related circles
(computer-aided proof, numerical methods etc.)

------
Chinjut
Minor correction: Gödel's incompleteness theorem dates to 1931, not 1944.

That said, I agree that the later Russell's more popular writing has been
given short shrift, and stands the test of time in many ways better than the
earlier Russell's logicism.

~~~
weinzierl
That is true, Gödel's incompleteness theorem dates to 1931. In 1944 Gödel
published his first philosophical paper, entitled _" On Russell's Mathematical
Logic"_.

The mistake was probably made because the author Julian Baggini is a
philosopher and so he is mostly aware of Gödel's philosophical works and not
so much of his mathematical accomplishments.

------
empath75
The Principia Mathematica was surely one of the most useful wrong-turns in
history.

------
moomin
I highly recommend The History of Western Philosphy precisely because it’s
highly opinionated. It’s got many things to like, including being frank about
not knowing the answers, and treating figures such as Augustine and Aquinas as
philosophers in their historical context. A very engaging book.

~~~
jhanschoo
If you are looking for a proper introduction to western philosophy and a
history of ideas, I recommend instead Antony Kenny's A New History of Western
Philosophy, which academics think is an excellent introduction.

------
Ericson2314
No applied logic is useful, but you need computers because the proof is big.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automath)
gets started just around the time he dies, so Russel still made the right
call, but lets not sacrifice a good idea "cause Gödel" for all eternity to
prop him back up.

------
wadkar
I was halfway through the third or fourth paragraph and thoroughly confused
which Russel is the author talking about. I don’t understand why the author
mentions the first Russel if the article isn’t (mainly) about a comparison
between the two.

It confused me so I’ll ask the obvious question: this article is about the
second Russel who wrote Why I am not a Christian, right?

~~~
eatplayrove
I don't know if this is what you are actually asking but it reads like that.

There are no two Russells, it's the same person, just different kind of works
in different periods of his life.

~~~
wadkar
> There are no two Russells

What? Okay, I really didn’t realize that it’s just one Russel.

I mean if you read the first paragraph and don’t have background in philosophy
you would assume there were two persons named Russel after reading the first
paragraph! I mean author says the first Russell was short lived and gives
yearX-yearY. So yeah, I thought the first Russell died in yearY!!

I feel stupid now :-/

------
musicale
I never thought that Godel incompleteness of a logical system was particularly
damaging; the ability to make self-referential statements is useful, the
ability to resolve self-referential paradoxes less so.

Same for the halting problem in CS, which is typically resolved by (sleep
9999; kill -9 $pid). QED. ;-)

~~~
strbean
The trope of self-referential paradoxes as the foundation for grander proofs
has always bugged me. My gut always says "sure, but what if we just banned
self-referential paradoxes?"

~~~
andrewflnr
I think those are called type theories. IIRC that was at least the idea behind
the original type theories, before they got co-opted by the CS rabble. :)

~~~
dllthomas
Right, IIUC type theory started as Bertrand Russell's attempt to do exactly
that (and follow through the ramifications - you can't "just" anything in
math). Then suddenly, Haskell. Or something.

~~~
nl
_Then suddenly, Haskell._

Sequence of events:

Russell publishes Principia Mathematica (1910-1913)

David Hilbert studies Principia Mathematica, and keeps working on open
questions from it (1913 onwards):

 _He poses the proof of the consistency of arithmetic (and of set theory)
again as the main open problems. In both these cases, there seems to be
nothing more fundamental available to which the consistency could be reduced
other than logic itself. And Hilbert then thought that the problem had
essentially been solved by Russell’s work in Principia. Nevertheless, other
fundamental problems of axiomatics remained unsolved, including the problem of
the “decidability of every mathematical question,” which also traces back to
Hilbert’s 1900 address.

These unresolved problems of axiomatics led Hilbert to devote significant
effort to work on logic in the following years. In 1917, Paul Bernays joined
him as his assistant in Göttingen. In a series of courses from 1917–1921,
Hilbert, with the assistance of Bernays and Behmann, made significant new
contributions to formal logic._[1]

In 1928 Haskell Curry moved to Germany to study under David Hilbert

Curry's work developed into the Curry–Howard correspondence[2] which led to
the language being named after him.

[1] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hilbert-
program/#1.2](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hilbert-program/#1.2)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspondence#Origin,_scope,_and_consequences)

------
mikojan
> But although it is true that Russell’s political writings were often > naive
> and simplistic, ...

Say what? Of all the books on politics I've read in my youth Russell's were
some of best. Not simplistic but written in a clear language. Not naive but
stemming from the rich classical liberal and socialist tradition of the likes
of Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill. A tradition that has been
completely erased from the history books in the last decades (which ought to
make his political works all the more interesting).

(I fully accept the possibility that I am in fact naive and simple-minded, of
course. :D)

