It's All Russell's Fault !

IT WAS ALL RUSSELL’S FAULT

The sheer creative intellectual power of Bertrand Russell’s analysis of the word-sign “the” determined the direction followed by scientific philosophical thought after 1905 (the year “On Denoting” appeared in Mind).
His analysis translated the logic of sentences in which “the” plays the grammatical role of denotation, as part of a phrase that referred to one thing, but lacked an object. His forever memorable paradigm “the present kind of France is bald” is reread by every graduate student in philosophy. As a bloodline Lord Son of an Admiral in Her Royal Majesty’s The Queen’s Navy, and dominant European mathematical logician, French intellectuals and their future heads of State could only grimace and endure the rib. The anti-Greeks got similar sight gags about Socrates’ ugly pug nose into the literature.


Continental European philosophical thought, with the exception of Rudolf Carnap and the logical positivists, continued the more subjective, existential-phenomenal strand of classical philosophy. This followed use of unreconstructed language tokens, not yielding to the logical syntax of formal languages officially including only “udc”– a category of undefined descriptive constants in the formally reconstructed rule-determined system – as names.

Russellian “ideal language” analysis transposes the one-one relation of name to thing named required for true-or-false discourse, to a given set of stylistic signs set up as ‘substitute values for variables,” e.g., as a,b,c… for x in “Fx”, the standard logical form of subject-predicate sentences used to assert “x is F”. But denotation, or reference – the psychosemiotic function these words indicate – is first and foremost, metaphysically, and act of conscious sign use. The one-one relation is the universal form of each instance, organizing its content for inferential cognitive (textual) connection. This connection is given by assigning the named thing a predicate; unless this thing named is uniquely determined, no predicate assignment is determined and the sentence lacks truth or falsehood. Hence the requirement of one-name one-thing, at the lowest level of resolution of a logically organized S* matrix (a “science”).

The flip side of this seemingly straightforward logical procedure, taking ideal languages constructed on the basis of such as determining a total field of rational reference (content of consciousness under sign use), is that the tokens of use in actual contexts are not produced under logical, but rather causal, constraints, and interest in rational coherence in dropping names into text is not a top priority determinant. One name-one thing is fine as hypothetical starting point for an ideal language of science; and it is the key to digitalization. But the logical straight jacket is worn by only one brain function with signs --thought. And the function of names in actual discourse predicates on expressive (brain 2) and motivating (brain 3) energies.

Certain names refuse to be said – as “Jesus Christ”, probably, by many Jews; or “David”, by some Christians. To call a person’s name out loud is to summon their presence, according to the participation mystique psychology of primitives (Levy-Bruhl; Jung). To “Call Upon The Name of The Lord” is the priest’s, or preacher’s prerogative, congregants joining in with song, prayer, worship, fellowship, puts oneself, and all together, in a state receptive to Spirit messages (the “Word of the Lord”; “Preach Jesus”) sent by Grace. “Denotation” would be an insult in referring to Marduk. Whether this first movement by the Spirit carries further motive force, if Grace there be, depends on the presence, from an entirely different source, of the higher grade sacred cosmic substance AEIOUIA, or “remorse of conscience”.
On the soul side of sign use, designation is an act od “addressing”, standing before, or summoning, the addressee. There is a one-one relation on the soul side to the the inner unity, the essence of all things addressed. This unity, or oneness on the side of the addressee and the one addressing, is the ‘meaning’ of the predicate, carried over from one instance of the (common) named thing. Bringing subject and predicate together in an act of predication conjoins the thinking-feeling, head-soul brains, as if the inner predicate content carried by memory (and subject to instantaneous ‘lateral associations’), were “recognizing” its ‘twin’ as identical inner content in the actual object perceived in the flesh-and-blood present.

This is the 3 brain explanation of psychodynamics calls “projection” (and why it is almost, but not quite, identical with ‘expectation’). Given the lateral psychosemiotic associations with “perfect circle”, with textual definitions transcribing invariant calculations made by mathematical minds onto sky maps, accomplished by the Greeks, mirrored the movement of heavenly bodies in the sky. This was the metaphysics of the theological assumption made by the Christian Trinity (see below).

Russell’s formal definition of “The” phrases effectively split the two functions of denotation and address, ordinarily entwined in actual communication, one side or the other yielding dominance. These two functions correspond to text and token in sign use, which re-appears in formal logic in the x’s, F’s and quantifiers of well-formed sentences (hardly to be scorned!). Without the distinction, carried over from application to language as guide to metaphysics, to the analysis of communication, the use of “The” is particulate, denotational, true-false oriented to experienced reality correlated 1-1 with external, material-body-only things.

There is a use of “The” for predicates, that is to say, sign uses generalized from conscious content from the beginning. These begin as names of qualities of sense perception, as The Red, White and Blue, etc; including qualia, as the feeling of thanksgiving, pangs of remorse etc.; reaching to the level of reacting off units of predicsates, themselves, in ritual ceremonial group use. At this point in the development of articulate discourse, terms for the lower level qualities and qualia are taken up, along with unconscious fantasy templates including birth/sex trauma imprints, into logically related Hyper– myths, constructed from the totality of spatial experience mastered intellectually by star map knowledge. Plato’s discovery of the “The F of F” abstractor, discussed elsewhere, supplied a psychosemiotic mechanism for higher-level predication on predicates, but the actual inhabitants of what is mostly dismissively dubbed “Plato’s Heaven” are hardly metaphysically probed, much less subject to an ordered exposition of their totality (except for the regular solids for three dimensional space).

The generic content shared “from below” by the anatomical processes of sign users include those retained by lower brain memory-imprints. The reptilian, for countless ages the only bulb lighting up to such wattage on the line of veretebrate amphibians. Then came the mammalian, aeons of psychosemiotic soul-genetic engineering and gearing. The three brain beings, cro magnon human, super- mammal, crowned with speech and thought. I think of these as 100-75-50 watt light bulbs of different hues, burning inside one another.

A look back – then forward, from these early 1900s’ origins of formal logic to reconstructed ideal language philosophy – then laterally at any stopping point, to the present – shows that Russell’s analysis splits off the strictly textual, true-false contexts of it’s use from what it communicates in broad, unreconstructed contexts. In spoken discourse, for instance, “the non-existent”, or “the hunch there might not be a dollar much longer” slip unopposed into grammar with little denotative backing (maybe ‘qualia’). Proceeding to such firther constructions as: “the 4’s” (ambiguous in re whether text or token is intended); ‘the unicorn’ (wiki can refer you there); “The Trinity” (see 1 John 5.78) …These contexts all challenge metaphysical analysis; What are they about? Can anything true or false be predicated of or with them?

There is a one particular use of “the” outside the scope of Russell’s denotative translation, but applicable to his system writ large. It is the expression “The F of F”, where “F” abbreviates the predicate of a subject-predicate sentence of form “x is F.” In ordinary language contexts, “The F of F” plays a pivotal psychosemiotic role in the construction of higher level sign-use. “The God of Gods” predicated of Marduk by the Sumerians is among the earliest examples of such a construct. “Marduk is (the) God of Gods” is a token-taulogy for 2000 b.c Babylonians.
This form of sign use, doubling a single sign with “the” and “of”, serves an essential function in the construction of general discourse: to isolate and secondarily denote the subjective content communicated by use of an “F” term as both text and token, a predicate predicated on.

There was an inner psychosemiotic dynamic expressed by use of this “double” with “the”. English grammar uses “-ness” to re-iterate distinctness: “The F-ness of F” (cf. “Right-”, “black-”, “light-”). “The reed-ness of reed(s)” constructs what Greek philosophers called the reed’s “essence”. (Etymology: Middle English essencia and French essence, both from Latin essentia, from esse, to be, from the presumed present participle *ess ns, *essent- (on the model of differentia, difference, from differ ns, different-), created to translate Greek ousi (from ousa); see es- in Indo-European roots. –Wiki)

Though having such crucial use in constructing language for the totality of what is communicated in tokenspace, the formally generalized construction of “The F of F” ran into logical difficulty raised by inserting negation, and inference context, to generate Russell’s well known paradox of “predicates of all predicates that are not predicates of themselves”. From this springboard, to cleanse logic of formal paradoxes and self-contradiction, he invented the Theory of Logical Types, stratifying tokens of the same universe of discourse into extensional, self-consistent domains. The 7 text-token hierarchy of sign-uses applies this model of justified inference (self-consistent if mathematics is) over conscious content of all types under sign-use.

With this caveat, that Russell’s logic of quantification is thenceforward reinstated and moved up a theoretical notch, as it were, allowing predication over predicates within the universe of a model discourse of 49 square, the shift of “The”-use from: A. context of particularity to B. contexts of ‘essence’ totalities, re-opens the metaphysics of true and false predication when the subjects predicated on are already predicates themselves. What prevents bald headed kings of France from reappearing in Person in tokenspace?