num_pages: 252
description: This book is the only exhaustive study of Russell on modality and relevance ever written. Many philosophers seem unaware that Russell had any views on these subjects, or think he disliked them. There are two reasons for this. First, most philosophers, even many of those who write on his logic, have read few of Russell's nonlogical works, and those are the works in which Russell most often discusses modal issues. Second, Russell's seminal paper on modality, "Necessity and Possibility," read to the Oxford Philosophical Society in 1905, was not published during Russell's lifetime. Russell's logic has been universally criticized by modal logicians and relevance logicians for being too limited to accommodate their ideas. Dejnozka explains how Russell accommodates such ideas. As to modality, Russell's idea is to use notions of ordinary quantificational logic to define and analyze away the basic notions of modal logic. Modal notions are eliminated across the board. The ordinary individual and universal quantifiers are used to simulate modal notions. Literally speaking, Russell has banished modality from logic. Yet functionally speaking, Russell has achieved an S5 modal logic based on a rich and sophisticated theory of modality. Dejnozka imputes seven S5 logics to FG-MDL (full generality), FG-MDL* (truth in virtue of form), FG-MDL** (synthetic a priori), MDL-C (Humean causal), MDL-E (epistemic), and MDL-D and MDL-D* (deontic or moral). Dejnozka shows that Russell states the key to his modal theory in at least nine works over a period of at least thirty-six years, and explains away five "howlers." Russell's modal logic anticipates Carnap, Tarski, McKinsey, Almog, and Etchemendy, and has predecessors in Bolzano and Venn. Dejnozka argues that Russell anticipated Kripke's modal logic by over seventy years, and even indirectly influenced Kripke via Carnap and Evert Willem Beth. Dejnozka shows that Russell's logically proper names are rigid designators, and that Russell developed a causal reference theory of naming not far from Kripke's own. Focusing on Russell's whole-part theory of deduction, Dejnozka shows that Russell is a relevance logician with three progressively stronger forms of entailment. This refutes the view, advanced by Anderson and Belnap in their work Entailment, that Russell was anti-relevance. Dejnozka explains Russell's unified account of modality and relevance as different interpretive aspects of his quantificational logic. Last, Dejnozka argues that John Maynard Keynes inspired the 1912 Russell to adopt a theory of probability as degrees of logical relevance, and that Keynes was inspired in turn by the 1903 Russell and by the legal concept of logical relevance, and ultimately by Aristotle's theory of induction. The interdisciplinary argument involves both legal and philosophical scholarship.
language: English
title: Bertrand Russell on Modality and Logical Relevance
titlecomplete: Bertrand Russell on Modality and Logical Relevance (Avebury Series in Philosophy)
publisher: Ashgate Pub Ltd