Paradox

RUSSELL’S SET 321Russell now pictured the universe as a pile of buckshot.Like Hume’s ideas, Russell’s “atomic facts” were independentunits that could be logically compounded into molecularfacts. The role of the philosopher was to show howcomplex statements could be analyzed into simpler statementsand how atomic statements manage to be true orfalse. Like Leibniz, Russell assigned a central role to logicin his metaphysics.Ordinary language was unsuited for this project becauseit is larded with ambiguity, vagueness, and redundancy.What Russell needed was a logically perfect language; alanguage in which each object has a single name and eachname has a single object; a language in which each conceptis expressed by one and only one predicate; a language inwhich every sentence has clear rules for its construction.Paradoxes cannot arise in this language. Equivocation isimpossible because all ambiguity has been removed. Thesorites paradox cannot be expressed because there is novagueness. Puzzles about nonexistence disappear becausethere are no empty names. Puzzles about identity are forestalledbecause no object goes around under different names.Finally, meaninglessness is prevented because each atomicsentence is meaningful and all other sentences are moleculesthat are meaningfully assembled from meaningful atoms.In addition to rendering the negative service of preventingspurious issues from arising, the logically perfect languagepositively informs the metaphysician about the natureof reality. The language shows that the world is a collectionof facts rather than a heap of objects. “Bertrand Russell wasdescended from Prime Minister John Russell” and “PrimeMinister John Russell was descended from Bertrand Russell”are about the same individuals and employ the same concept.