Appendix I Reference Answers
Unit 1 Mathematics
Part I EST Reading
Reading 1
Section A Pre-reading Task
Warm-up Questions: Work in pairs and discuss the following questions.
1. Who is Bertrand Russell?
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (b.1872 – d.1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. His most influential contributions include his defense of logicism (the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic), his refining of the predicate calculus introduced by Gottlob Frege (which still forms the basis of most contemporary logic), his defense of neutral monism (the view that the world consists of just one type of substance that is neither exclusively mental nor exclusively physical), and his theories of definite descriptions and logical atomism. Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of modern analytic philosophy, and is regularly credited with being one of the most important logicians of the twentieth century.
2. What is Russell’s Paradox?
Russell discovered the paradox that bears his name in 1901, while working on his Principles of Mathematics (1903). The paradox arises in connection with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Such a set, if it exists, will be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. The paradox is significant since, using classical logic, all sentences are entailed by a contradiction. Russell's discovery thus prompted a large amount of work in logic, set theory, and the philosophy and foundations of mathematics.
3. What effect did Russell’s Paradox have on Gottlob Fregg’s system?
At first Frege observed that the consequences of Russell’s paradox are not immediately clear. For example, “Is it always permissible to speak of the extension of a concept, of a class? And if not, how do we recognize the exceptional cases? Can we always infer from the extension of one concept’s coinciding with that of a second, that every object wh ich falls under the first concept also falls under the second?Because of these kinds of worries, Frege eventually felt forced to abandon many of his views.
4. What is Russell’s response to the paradox?
Russell's own response to the paradox came with the development of his theory of types in 1903. It was clear to Russell that some restrictions needed to be placed upon the original comprehension (or abstraction) axiom of naive set theory, the axiom that formalizes the intuition that any coherent
