I am rereading, among other things, Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy–and with perhaps a more careful eye than in the past. Even so, I still enjoy Russell so much, partly because even when I disagree with him he stimulates my thinking.
The passage I’ve just annotated is one in which he is criticizing John Dewey’s theory of truth. He characterizes Dewey as saying that “a belief about some event in the past is to be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, not according to whether the event really took place, but according to the future effects of the belief.” He follow his definition with the example of “Suppose somebody says to me: “Did you have coffee with your breakfast this morning?” and goes on to show an absurdity in the definition he ascribes to Dewey.
But really, we very rarely need inquire too deeply into the “truth” of such a proposition as “I had coffee with my breakfast this morning.” And so, my comment was the following: The problem with Russell’s counter-example is that so few of what he considers to be facts can actually be known. He almost assumes that the past is a definite thing instead of a series of overlapping and blurry intimations of something that must have existed in one sense, but that in another is constructed and thus can be restructured.