Chapter 2 outline

The development of my philosophy can be divided into different stages according to some of my concerns and according to the people who have done research work that has influenced me.There is only one thing that sticks with me, and that hasn't changed: I've always been eager to discover how much we can say we know, and to what degree of certainty or uncertainty.In my philosophical research, there is a major division: in the two years 1899-1900, I adopted the Peano technique in the philosophy of logical atomism and mathematical logic.This change was so great that it made the research I had done before (except pure mathematics) irrelevant to everything I did later.The change of these two years was a revolution; the changes that followed were evolutionary in nature.

My initial interest in philosophy had two sources: on the one hand, my eagerness to discover whether philosophy could provide a justification, however general, for anything that could be called religious belief; , if not in other fields, at least in pure mathematics, there are some things that people can know.I have thought about both these questions in my youth, in solitude, without the aid of books.Regarding religion, I finally did not believe in free will first, then in immortality, and finally in God.Regarding the basics of mathematics, I am at a loss.Although I am quite empiricist, I cannot believe that "two plus two equals four" is inductively generalized from experience, but I am still skeptical about anything other than this purely negative conclusion.

What was instilled in me at Cambridge was the philosophy of Kant and Hegel.But G. E. Moore and I subsequently rejected both philosophies.I think that while we agree on betrayal, there are major differences in what we each emphasize. I think that Moore's original interest was primarily in the fact that facts are independent of knowledge, and in negating Kant's whole set of a priori intuitions and categories that mold experience instead of casting the external world.On this point, I warmly agree with him.But I was more concerned with something purely logical than he was.The most important of these and the one that dominated my later philosophy was what I called the "doctrine of external relations."Monists claim that the relationship between two terms is actually always constituted by the properties of the two separate terms and the properties of the whole composed of these two terms. It can also be strictly said that the relationship between the two terms is only formed by the two The properties of the whole composed of items constitute.I think this view makes mathematics unexplainable.I have come to the conclusion that relations do not imply any corresponding complexity in the related terms, and, in general, do not amount to any property of the whole of the two terms.Just after I came up with this idea in one of my books, On the Philosophy of Leibniz, I discovered Peano's work in mathematical logic.This gave me a new technique of mathematics and a new philosophy of mathematics.Hegel and his disciples were in the habit of "proving" the impossibility of space, time, and matter, and in general, of everything that ordinary people believed to be impossible.Convinced that Hegel's arguments against this or that were untenable, my reaction was to go to the opposite extreme and begin to believe that everything that cannot be disproved is true, e.g., points, instants, Particles and Platonic universals.

After 1910, however, after I had done all the pure mathematics I wanted to do, I began to think about the world of physics.Due to the influence of Whitehead, this gave me a new application of Occam's razor.Before that, because of the usefulness of Occam's razor in the philosophy of arithmetic, I have long liked Occam's razor.Whitehead convinced me that we can study physics without first assuming that points and instants are the stuff of which the world is made.He argued (and on this point I later agreed) that the elements of the physical world can be made up of events, each of which occupies a finite amount of space-time.Whenever we use Occam's razor, we don't have to deny the existence of those entities we don't use, but we can be sure of their existence.This has the advantage of reducing the assumptions needed to explain any aspect of knowledge.Concerning the physical world, it is impossible to prove that there are no point-instants, but it is possible to prove that physics has no reason to assume such things.

At the same time, that is to say, in the years from 1910 to 1914, I became interested not only in what the physical world is but in how we can come to know it. The relation of perception to physics has been a problem which I have been working on intermittently since then, and it is in connection with this problem that my philosophy underwent its last major change.Before this, I had thought that perception was a relation of two terms, subject and object, because this made it easier to see how perception could provide knowledge of things other than the subject. But because of the influence of William James, I finally think that this view is wrong, and it can be said that it is, at any rate, an oversimplification.At least sensation, or even sight or hearing, does not seem to me to be a relational event in its nature.I do not mean, of course, that when I see something there is no relation between me and what I see; I mean that the relation is much more indirect than I had thought, And the logical structure of what I feel when I see something can quite well happen even if there is nothing outside of me that I can see.This change in my opinion greatly increases the difficulties involved in connecting experience with the external world.

At about the same time, that is to say, about 1917, another problem became interesting to me, that of the relationship between language and facts.There are two parts to this question: the first part has to do with vocabulary; the second has to do with syntax.Before I became interested in this question, many people have already discussed it.Mrs. Willback has written a book on this subject.  E． C． S．Schiller has been emphasizing the importance of this issue.But I've always thought of language as transparent—that is, as an intermediary that we can use without paying attention to it.Regarding syntax, it is the contradictions in mathematical logic that force me to think that this view is inappropriate.Regarding vocabulary, I have studied the extent to which knowledge can be explained by behaviorism, and I have the problem of language.For these two reasons, I have paid much more attention to the linguistic aspects of the theory of knowledge than before.But I have never had any sympathy for those who regard language as a sphere of autonomy.The point of language is that language has meaning—that is, it is related to something other than itself, which is generally non-linguistic.

My latest research is related to the problem of unproven inferences.In the past, empiricists believed that the reason why this inference could be established was by induction.It is a pity that it can be proved that if we ignore common sense and use the induction method of simple enumeration, more mistakes will be made and less truths will be obtained.It is not a principle that will satisfy a logician if it requires common sense before it can be used safely.Therefore, if we are to accept the general outlines of science, and common sense (limited to irrefutable common sense), we must seek another principle than induction.

This is a big question.I cannot presume I have accomplished anything more than to show the way to seek a solution. Since I gave up the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, I have been using the analytical method to seek solutions to philosophical problems.I still firmly believe (despite a modern tendency to the contrary) that progress can only be made with analysis.To give an important example, I found that the problem of the relationship between mind and matter can be completely solved by analyzing physics and perception.It is true that this solution, as I think it, has not been admitted by anyone, but I believe, and hope, only because my theory is not yet understood.