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                                              September 26, 2019
David Pears, The author of the
introduction to the 1985 edition of
Russell's "Philosophy of Logical
Atomism" wants to raise the question     I can't say that
of why you would believe in the          strikes me as a
atomic approach at all, i.e. why         burning issue....
would you assume that larger things
are best explained by understanding           Though there is the problem of
smaller components.                           "emergent behavior" that isn't
                                              predictable just by understanding
There's some complaint about Russell          the smaller components.
being somewhat inconsistent about
how he supports the atomic approach,          Some phenomena arises out
is it regarded as self-evidently              of the sheer numbers of
true (an attitude attributed to               "atom"s as much as the
Leibniz) or is it empirically                 characteristics of the atoms.
determined (ala Hume).

   Myself, I suppose I prefer empiricism, but if
   all we had was the "rationalist" assumption
   that it was self-evident, I'd still take it as
   a decent working hypothesis.


Oh, and actually it's not *just* an
understanding by dividing and conquering
into "logical atoms" there is also,
according David Pears, "the assumption         But is there *really* anything
that there is a general correspondence         like that in the text?  I haven't
between language and reality, which            seen it, and yet it would be
ensures that the complete analysis of          profoundly weird for Pears to
words will match the complete analysis of      just project it on what's being
things ..."                                    said...

                                                           And to the contrary,
Now that would indeed be a dubious claim:                  Russell does talk
It makes the presumption that our current,                 about the necessity
colloquial understanding of the world is                   of a kind of
in essence correct, which while that might                 ambiguity: there are
very well be largely true, strikes me as a                 necessarily many
very boring presumption-- it rules out, at                 meanings of words.
the outset the possibility of any sort of
revolution of understanding... And it                      LOGICAL_LANGUAGE
dismisses the very possiblity that
something might be "counter-intuitive"
when actually we have many
well-established examples of that.


It occurs to me that if the idea is really:

    "... reality is composed of logical
    atoms which are not further analyzable."

Then almost by definitions these logical atoms have
to be our starting point for understanding, because
they're the most "fundamental" elements that we can
actually understand.




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