Reconsidering Dualism
Logical Atomism was an early twentieth century philosophical movement championed by Bertrand Russell. It was based on an analogy between atoms and mathematical axioms. It was inspired, both by the resounding success of the science of physics, and at the prospect of the merging of logic and mathematics, also championed by Russell, that seemed imminent at the turn of the last century. Just as physical matter is ultimately made up of combinations of atoms, concepts were envisioned to be made up of combinations of primitive atoms of meaning, like axioms in a deductive system. The idea was that meaning has some kind of logical structure analogous to physical structure; and the belief was that some future science could determine the laws governing this “conceptual” structure, just as physics shows us the physical laws that govern the universe. One hundred years after the heyday of Logical Atomism, how has that atomic analogy fared? Indeed, where is the science of meaning? Where ar