In "What is History For?," Scott Soames responds to criticisms of his treatment of Russell's logic in volume 1 of his "Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century." This note rebuts two of Soames's replies, showing that a first-order presentation of Russell's logic does not fit the argument of the "Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy," and that Soames's contextual definition of classes does not match Russell's contextual definition of classes. In consequence, Soames's presentation of Russell's logic misrepresents what Russell took to be (...) its technical achievement and its philosophical significance. (shrink)

Certain commentators on Russell's “no class” theory, in which apparent reference to classes or sets is eliminated using higher-order quantification, including W. V. Quine and (recently) Scott Soames, have doubted its success, noting the obscurity of Russell’s understanding of so-called “propositional functions”. These critics allege that realist readings of propositional functions fail to avoid commitment to classes or sets (or something equally problematic), and that nominalist readings fail to meet the demands placed on classes by mathematics. I show that Russell (...) did thoroughly explore these issues, and had good reasons for rejecting accounts of propositional functions as extra-linguistic entities. I argue in favor of a reading taking propositional functions to be nothing over and above open formulas which addresses many such worries, and in particular, does not interpret Russell as reducing classes to language. (shrink)