‘Your honour, my client’s defence is very simple. He accepts that he did indeed write in his newspaper column that “the current manager of the England football team is a liar, an idiot and a national disgrace”. He also accepts going on to say that he “should be shot”. But by doing so, he in no way libelled the plaintiff, Mr Glenn Robson-Keganson.
‘The reason for this is easy to see. At the time the article was written and published, there was no such person as the England football team manager. Mr Robson-Keganson had tendered his resignation two days earlier, and his offer had been accepted. This news became public knowledge on the day the defendant’s article was published.
‘The plaintiff claims that the accusations my client made were false. But they were neither true nor false, since they were not about anyone. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say they were meaningless. “Flar-Flar is a racehorse” is true if Flar-Flar is a racehorse, false if she is not, and meaningless if there is no such beast.
‘The jury should therefore dismiss the case. It is just nonsense to suggest one can libel someone who does not exist. I rest my case.’
Source: ‘On Denoting’ by Bertrand Russell, in Mind 14 (1905), widely anthologised and republished on the internet
Logicians are not like ordinary people. When most people speak they are content that they can make themselves understood and that others will generally know what they mean, even if they put things a bit awkwardly or imprecisely at times. Logicians, on the other hand, are frustrated by the vagaries and ambiguities of everyday language. The point is, they will insist, that their apparently trivial quibbles have implications.
Consider the defence for the case brought by Glenn Robson-Keganson. The jury would probably dismiss it on the grounds that we know who he meant by ‘the current manager of the England football team’. But let us take his words literally and accept that there was no such person at the time. Wouldn’t they still insist that the allegations were false? For if there was no such person, to claim he was ‘a liar, an idiot and a national disgrace’ is surely untrue?
If we hold this, however, there are indeed implications, ones that greatly troubled Bertrand Russell when he pondered the truth of the statement ‘the present king of France is bald’ if Gaul is a republic. The problem is that, in logic, the negation of a false statement is true. So, for example, if ‘the sun orbits the Earth’ is false, then clearly ‘the sun does not orbit the Earth’ is true. That means, however, that if ‘the King of France is bald’ is false, then ‘the King of France is not bald’ must be true. But it can’t be true that the King of France is not bald, because there is no such monarch. And so it seems that such statements as ‘the King of France is bald’ when there is no king and ‘the current manager of the England football team is a liar’ when there is no such manager are neither true nor false.
If a statement is neither true nor false, doesn’t that make it meaningless? You might think so, but surely the meaning of the statement ‘the current manager of the England football team is a liar’ is perfectly clear. And a meaningless statement, the meaning of which is clear, would seem to be a contradiction in terms.
And so the implications of the apparently innocuous puzzle of how and whether such statements can be true or false spin out and multiply. We haven’t even touched on the link with the idea that words correspond to objects in the world, and that the truth or falsity of statements depends on whether the correspondence holds.
The puzzle cannot, of course, be resolved here. One thing is clear, however. If you find these problems trivial rather than engrossing, don’t study logic or the philosophy of language.
See also
| 23. | The beetle in the box |
| 45. | The invisible gardener |
| 47. | Rabbit! |
| 74. | Water, water, everywhere |