Re: Propositions

Ah, well, Platonism; that's a whole issue in itself. I am not immediately sure, however, how it would impinge on mind-brain monism, or on the issue of determinism. When Russell, following Moore, rebelled against idealism, he began by believing that propositions had to be real entities, since otherwise beliefs, desires and so forth would lack objects. This, however, led to certain difficulties. Suppose, for example, that I believe p is a true proposition, where p happens to be a false proposition. Let us say that p is the proposition that Desdemona loves Cassio. So what is the object of my belief here? Well, the object is the complex Desdemona loves Cassio. However, since Desdemona does not love Cassio, there is no such complex in reality, and thus there is no object of belief in this case. If we reify propositions it is difficult to see how we can account for false beliefs and unrealised desires. It is not surprising that Russell quickly abandoned this view of propositions. It is fair to say that his subsequent investigations completely revolutionised our understanding of the relation of language to the world, and of course were the impetus for the philosophical work of Wittgenstein. As an Andersonian realist (sort of), I believe that all entities are spatio-temporal, and that there are no such things as different 'levels' of reality. But anyway, we each have our own philosophical prejudices and this is probably too big a field to go into here.