A Reconstruction of Russell's Gray's Elegy Argument

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed exegesis of Russell’s “Gray’s Elegy Argument” (GEA). It holds that the GEA mounts a successful attack on Frege—a thesis that has been widely controverted in the literature. The point of departure for my interpretation is Russell’s charge that it is impossible to speak about Sinne, or “meanings” as Russell calls them. I argue that the charge concerns the construction of an “ideal language.” For Russell, an ideal language is an artificial schema designed to represent the truth-makers for sentences occurring in natural language. Its signs stand for the entities that are constituents of those truth-makers. Russell’s charge can thus be expressed more clearly and completely as follows: an ideal language designed to express Frege’s ontology requires signs for meanings (Sinne); however, the signs introduced for that purpose cannot be correlated with the entities they are supposed to represent. Thus, the requirement cannot be met.

Russell: do idealismo à gênese da teoria das descrições

“…E, segundo, uma vez que cada ciência é incompleta em si mesma, os seus resultados parciais estão crivados de contradições. A questão das contradições em cada ciência é um problema à parte do idealismo britânico porque, como alerta Griffin, "Bradley e muitos outros neo-hegelianos não distinguiam claramente entre contradição e incompletude, alegando que qualquer coisa aquém de uma descrição totalmente abrangente do Absoluto envolveria contradições" (GRIFFIN, 1991, p. 84, tradução nossa) 49 . 48 No original: "A theory of knowledge must accept existing knowledges as its data: its problem must be unified them, to make a self-consistent whole of the various Sciences, to interpreted these in such a way as to overcome their apparent contradictions.…”

“…These results must be critized by Epistemology, their one-sidedness if possible corrected, so that the results of the different Sciences may be exhibited as consistent with each other and as parts of a whole of knowledge". 49 No original: "Bradley and many other of the neo-Hegelians did not distinguish clearly between contradiction The Union, and about to become a Fellow, and inspired me with awe on account of his metaphysical reputation, but he was too shy to come in, and I was too shy to ask him to come in". 51 Encontra-se, em Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, a seguinte declaração: "em Cambridge, fui apresentado à filosofia de Hegel que, no decorrer de dezenove volumes obscuros, professou ter provado algo que funcionaria muito bem como uma versão corrigida e sofisticada das crenças tradicionais.…”