Recently, there has been a growing awareness that Russell’s post–1918 writings call into question the sort of picture that Rorty presents of the relation of Russell’s philosophy to the views of subsequent figures such as the later Wittgenstein, Quine, and Sellars. As I will argue in this paper, those writings show that by the early 1920’s Russell himself was advocating views—including an anti-foundationalist naturalized epistemology, and a behaviorist–inspired account of what is involved in understanding language—that are more typically associated with (...) philosophers from later decades whom are mistakingly often rpesented as dismantling Russell’s philosophy. (shrink)

Though Frege was interested primarily in reducing mathematics to logic, he succeeded in reducing an important part of logic to mathematics by defining relations in terms of functions. By contrast, Whitehead & Russell reduced an important part of mathematics to logic by defining functions in terms of relations (using the definite description operator). We argue that there is a reason to prefer Whitehead & Russell's reduction of functions to relations over Frege's reduction of relations to functions. There is an interesting (...) system having a logic that can be properly characterized in relational but not in functional type theory. This shows that relational type theory is more general than functional type theory. The simplification offered by Church in his functional type theory is an over-simplification: one can't assimilate predication to functional application.<br>. (shrink)