Antiphilosophical Dictionary - Peter Naur

[Asolsutsesvyl]

As for Bertrand Russell, his development into a philosopher was not a development into spirituality. He analysed mind and other matters, and in the process provided and used flawed definitions of belief, intellectual life, and more. That kind of thing is traditionally bigger in academic philosophy, but boring to and ignored by most spiritual seekers.

Russell is also the logician whose hopes of rigorously and unambiguously providing a logical foundation for all mathematics came to nothing when Kurt Godel used logic to prove the limitations of what logic is able to prove, limitations making what Russell aspired to a logical impossibility.

In practice, there's a huge difference in most cases between the stuff which interests metaphysical explorers in communities like this and what academic philosophical argumentation has been about. The philosophical arguments in the mainstream are still stuck on whether or not all is matter, or all is mind, or both exist separately, and whether God exists, etc.


Anyway, here's two short examples of thought-worthy stuff from the book.

On how materialistic philosophy contorts the descriptions of things and then arbitrarily declares this or that illusory...

From time to time the philosophers succeed in dragging even significant scientists into their truth swamp. A prominent example is Eddington. He made great contributions to astrophysics and relativity theory, but also embarked on books having such titles as The Philosophy of Physical Science and The Nature of the Physical World. In the latter, from 1928, he discusses what he finds is `the philosophical outcome of the great changes of scientific thought which has recently come about'. In this book he is greatly concerned with truth.

[...] Eddington continues to tell how at another occasion he also thought of waves on water, but at that time took out another book, with a poem describing an impression of a frozen lake under the light of the night sky. He speaks of the deep impression the poem makes upon him, and says that `life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist.' But then he continues:

`Of course it was an illusion. We can easily expose the rather clumsy trick that was played on us. Aethereal vibrations of various wave-lengths, reflected at different angles [...] photoelectric action [...] to a brain-centre. [...]'

There was one for you, all you naive laymen, who believe you know something about the things around you, come to the deep philosopher, he will reveal your illusions.

But it is nonsense, Eddington's presumptuous talk of illusions. It is no better than if a philosopher would say to me: You believe you are sitting there in a soft chair; but you are the victim of an illusion, you are in reality sitting in a wooden frame covered with cotton textiles and lacquer. And if philosopher number 2 came along and said: Wrong, in reality you are sitting in a model 92-133 covered with material 2217.

Eddington's talk of illusions stems from the Aristotelian dogma that the things merely `are' something Aristotle calls their essential properties (see essence, p.22) and that all other properties are illusions. Eddington himself gets lost in his hunt for the essence. He talks first about the solid substance of things, the material of the water moving. But then he says that the solid substance of things is another illusion. `We have chased the solid substance from the continuous liquid to the atom, from the atom to the electron, and there we have lost it.'

The dogma of essential properties serves no purpose other than the generation of idle nonsense. As we all know, things have lots of properties, of widely different kinds. Fixing our attention at some of them at a certain moment does not make us the victim of any illusion. Eddington's undulating water has such properties that are described by Lamb's equations, but it may just as fully have the properties the poet has expressed in words. There is here no contradiction or possibility of illusion. [...]

On how thinking and language are not quite the same thing, and how verbal formulation is merely something smaller and more limited arrived at...

Thinking-as-language-fallacy: Thus is denoted here the notion that our mental activity mainly consists of a processing of verbal expressions. The fallacy goes with the talk of `knowledge' in the form of verbal statements. The fallacy is expressed in detail by Bertrand Russell, see belief (p. 7). It is found in Quine's Word and Object, p. 3, where he says: `Actual memories mostly are traces not of past sensations but of past conceptualization or verbalization', and in Eddington's talk of `Symbolic Knowledge and Intimate Knowledge', see psychology (p. 66). The fallacy finds expression in Turing's Test, see Turing (p. 81).

The thinking-as-language-fallacy is flatly contradicted by the experience of every author, that the generation of the text in progress is a troublesome process, not merely a copying of something already there. Every word, every sentence, requires a tiring exertion (see the description under introspection, p. 30). This typical author's experience may be understood as a consequence of the fact that the generation of each verbal expression involves a choice that has to be made at the moment of generation. This choice again depends on a merely vague feeling about which property of the matter of concern is to be expressed. Each aspect of the world has an infinity of properties (see essence, p. 22). Giving expression of some of them requires a selection, both of which properties and of which verbal expression.

Thus any verbal formulation involves a situation dependent choice between an indefinite mass of possibilities. Correspondingly any verbal formulation will be incomplete compared with the properties of the matter of concern.

The thinking-as-language-fallacy is closely related to fallacies and lack of understanding about conception and denotation, see concept (p. 11).

For a more tenable understanding than thinking-as-language, see stream of thought (p.  75).

See also word-as-code-of-meaning-fallacy (p. 84). Further references are given in the Literature Appendix (p. 89).