The passages in Russell (1908) and Whitehead and Russell (1910–13) that appear to state a sentential semantics for propositional functions should not be regarded as precise statements of a semantics.
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# Russell
Russell most commonly refers to **Bertrand Russell**, a highly influential British philosopher, logician, and social critic (1872-1970) who fundamentally changed how we think about logic, language, and knowledge. He's famous for showing that common-sense reasoning can contain hidden contradictions and for arguing that philosophy should use the precision of mathematics to solve problems. Russell also became a prominent public intellectual who wrote about everything from religion to nuclear weapons, making him one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.
Sentential semantics(as the type of theory being examined)
A theory about what sentences mean and how they get their meaning—specifically, how the meaning of whole sentences relates to logic and truth.
Whitehead and Russell(as co-authors of an influential philosophical work)
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell collaborated on a groundbreaking three-volume work called 'Principia Mathematica' that tried to show how all of mathematics could be built from logical principles.
propositional functions(PM's logical system)
A foundational element of the logic of Principia Mathematica (PM), distinct from Frege's use of concepts (functions from objects to truth values)
semantics(Distinguished from metasemantics and pragmatics in Kaplan 1989)
The domain that concerns the facts about what meanings words or phrases have.
Many passages in [(Russell 1908)] and [(Whitehead and Russell 1910–13)] may be understood as saying or as having the consequence that the values of propositional functions are sentences. But a coherent semantics of Russell’s formalized language can hardly be provided on this basis (notice in particular, that, since sentences are also substituted for propositional variables, it would be necessary to take sentences as names of sentences.) And since the passages in question seem to involve confusio
Extraction notes
Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks