Negative Facts, Bertrand Russell and Empty Talk

 Negative facts bothered cerebrotonic ectomorph Bertrand Russell.  What sort of acquaintance could you have with them.  His nature abhorred a vacuum.  There was a fine fat emptiness where a fact should be, and not just any fact but one which the Nyaya folk called yogyata or pertinent.  There are an infinite number of items nameable and knowable, just not here in this room, but.  The elephant not in the room was Bertrand’s elephant and he wanted it out of there and in his stall of knowledge.

Bertrand, you are very greatly mistaken if you think that the non-apprehension of the existence of Jumbo is a piece of knowledge.  It is a means of knowledge and it informs your search.  It tells you to look elsewhere.  Can there be a distinction between a means of knowledge and knowledge itself?  Spectacles and what you see with them.  A walking stick and ambulation.  It would seem you can.  Of course those are just analogies, single use conceptual ‘burners’.

Can Jumbo’s absence be translated as ‘It is true that there is no elephant here’.  You have steered away from facts.  Do such locutions make any difference to the order of things that are in this room.  Is it an improvement?  C.K. Ogden in his ‘Meaning of Meaning’ writes that whether they are tied with clear string or knotted parcels are just ‘honest parcels’.

“When we dispute as to whether a fact is positive or negative, or whether there are ‘negative facts’ we are engaged merely in the criticism of rival prose styles.”

J.N. Findlay and the Non-Apprehension of Existence (anupalabadhi)

I’m reading J.N. Findlay’s The Discipline of the Cave his Gifford Lectures of 1965 and enjoying it. He lays about him with vigorous eloquence the timid orthodoxy of the day namely ‘ordinary language’ and ‘analysis’. Here he defends what the Vedantin would call anupalabadhi or the non-apprehension of existence as a valid means of knowledge.

 There can, it may be argued, be no negative facts: this does not prove that Mother Hubbard and her dog did not encounter a most distressing negative phenomenon when they opened the cupboard, which admits neither of metaphysical nor psychological reduction. Heidegger's withers are unwrung by all those sunny analyses which prove that nothing, or the total absence of anything, is not a genuine object, and that it is not therefore possible to feel dread in the face of it. Nothing or the total absence of anything is a genuine object of contemplation and of varied emotional attitudes—much of the exquisite culture of Japan, for instance, seems to be built around it—and it is much more certain that this is so than that some piece of analysis is a correct one.