Russell on Modality
Russell on Modality
This essay presents a synoptic account of Russell’s changing views concerning possibility and necessity. The essay shows how an intuitionist view of logical necessity, according to which it is a fundamental, indefinable property that is ‘purely and simple perceived’, swiftly gives way in Russell’s work to scepticism concerning whether necessity exists at all, since he holds that it cannot be explained by analyticity. The essay then shows how Russell returns, in effect, to both Aristotle and Hume with the thought that necessity is grounded on the universal truth of the relevant propositional function, and an attendant feeling of necessity. The essay also addresses Russell’s later suggestion that the domain of quantification of propositional functions is possible worlds—the idiom was familiar to him from his early book on Leibniz—and argues that Russell’s commitments point towards what in contemporary modal theory would be called a quasi-linguistic modal ersatzism.
Keywords: Russell, modality, possibility, necessity, analyticity
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