Friday Book Report: An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth

“Words, from the earliest times of which we have historical records, have been objects of superstitious awe.  The man who knew his enemy’s name could, by means of it, acquire magic powers over him… This view underlies the philosophies of Plato and Carnap and of most of the intermediate metaphysicians.” (p. 23)

“Thus the difference between a statement which is disjunctive and one which is not does not consist in any difference in the state of affairs which would make it true, but solely in the question whether the difference between the possibilities which our statement leaves open is interesting to us or not.” (p. 87)

These two passages from Bertrand Russell’s An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth serve as a handy summary of what I love and hate about philosophy.  On one hand, there is the magic power that deep thinking brings when we examine what we are actually saying.  On the other, there is the suspicion that, in the end, we are just playing games with words that are more or less interesting.

Somewhere in the middle, there are some useful things.  Philosophical prose is kind of like the barre exercises of writing, useful for training and sometimes beautiful, but ultimately there to underpin (we hope) something beautiful later.  Parsing out the sentences and following the laborious chains of reasoning are good for the brain, but not precisely fun.

Those of us interested in how brains work and one possible way that language captures experience may find this book an interesting project.  If not, there are many other places to explore.