Monday 5th October, 1914: LW’s diary entry records that today he received a letter from Keynes (econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Keynes.html ), but that Keynes wrote only to ask him what would happen about W.E.Johnson’s money after the war. [Since June 1913, LW had been anonymously donating a stipend of 200 GBP per month to give Johnson relief from teaching and enable him to pursue his research] The letter, he reports, ‘gave me a pang’. He also received a card from his mother, from the first day of the month, reporting that all was well. LW notes that he has ‘thought of Russell often over the last days, and wonder whether he still thinks of me. It was strange, our meeting! In times of outward well-being, we do not think about the fragility of the flesh’ (GT1, SS.34-35). LW notes that it *is* possible to correlate a simple sign with the sense of a sentence. ‘Logic is interested only in reality. And thus in sentences ONLY in so far as they are pictures of reality’. But how CAN a single *word* be true or false? It cannot express the *thought* that agrees or does not agree with reality – that thought *must* be something articulated. So a single word can’t be true or false in this sense: it can’t agree with reality, or the opposite (NB, p.9). (These remarks flesh out LW’s response to his own question, from yesterday, of whether a single word can be true or false)
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 07:48:50 +0000
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