哲学报告

assignment

1.relation and particular

It is clear that each particular has its being independently of any other, and it does not depend upon anything else for the logical possibility of its existence. Compared particular with the old conception of substance, particulars have self-subsidence that used to belong to substance, but not the quality of persistence through time. A particular is apt to last for a very short time indeed, not an instant but a very short time. In order to understand a proposition in which the name of a particular occurs, we may be acquaintance with that particular. When we have acquaintance with a particular, we understand that particular its fully, independently of the fact there are a great many propositions about it that we do not know, but these propositions which are concerning the particulars are not necessary to be known.

Everything has relations to everything else, we cannot know all the facts of which a thing is a constituent without having some knowledge of everything in the universe. “Knowing a particular “merely means the acquaintance with the particular and is presupposed in the understanding of any propositions in which that particular is mentioned. So we cannot take the view that the understanding of the name of the particular presuppose knowledge of all the propositions concerning that particular. In fact, the only thing we can really understand is the symbol, and to understand a symbol is to know what it stands for. Understanding a predicate is quite a different thing from understanding a name. To understand a name, we must be acquaintance with the particular of which it is a name, and we must know that it is the name of that particular. A predicate can never occur except as a predicate, when it seems to occur as a subject, the phrase wants amplifying and explaining. The same applies to relations, a relation also can never occur except as a relation. So the understanding of a predicate is a little more complicate than the understanding of a name. And in fact, when we understand the meaning of relations and the meaning of other parts, we might not know whether the proposition is true, but we understand the proposition.

2.Reduction

The different sorts of words have different sorts of uses. It is fallacies arising from putting symbols to wrong uses that lead to the contradiction concerned with types. There is no particular reason to suppose that the simplest relation that occur in the world are of order n., but there is also no priori reason to against it. The converse reduction is impossible except in certain special cases where the relations have some special properties. When the relations are symmetrical, it is formally possible to reduce to either sameness of predicate or differences of predicates. But if is an asymmetrical relation, there is no such possibility. And this impossibility of reducing is a matter of great deal of importance in connection with traditional philosophy. Because a great deal of traditional philosophy depend upon the assumption that every proposition really is of the subject-predicate form.

3.molecular propositions