Principia Mathematica

Principia Mathematica, monumental work in the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of logic, first published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913, by the British philosophers Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Principia Mathematica was intended to lay bare the logical foundations of mathematics—i.e., to show that the basic concepts and modes of reasoning used in mathematics are definable in logical terms.

The philosophical case for this point of view—subsequently known as logicism—was stated at length in Russell’s earlier work, The Principles of Mathematics (1903). There Russell argued that the whole of mathematics could be derived from a few simple axioms that made no use of specifically mathematical notions, such as number and square root, but were rather confined to purely logical notions, such as proposition and class. Near the end of his work on The Principles of Mathematics, Russell discovered that he had been anticipated in his logicist philosophy of mathematics by the German mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), whose book The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) contained, as Russell put it, “many things…which I believed I had invented.” Russell quickly added an appendix to his book that discussed Frege’s work, acknowledged Frege’s earlier discoveries, and explained the differences in their respective understandings of the nature of logic.

In 1901 Russell discovered a contradiction—now known as Russell’s paradox—at the very heart of the system of logic upon which he had hoped to build the whole of mathematics. The contradiction arises from the following considerations: some classes are members of themselves (e.g., the class of all classes), and some are not (e.g., the class of all persons), so one ought to be able to construct the class of all classes that are not members of themselves. But now, if one asks of this class “Is it a member of itself?” one becomes enmeshed in a contradiction. If it is, then it is not, and if it is not, then it is. This is rather like defining a village barber as “the man who shaves all those who do not shave themselves” and then asking whether the barber shaves himself or not.

At first this paradox seemed trivial, but the more Russell reflected upon it, the deeper the problem seemed, and eventually he was persuaded that there was something fundamentally wrong with the notion of class as he had understood it in The Principles of Mathematics. Frege saw the depth of the problem immediately. When Russell wrote to him in 1902 to tell him of the paradox, Frege replied, “arithmetic totters.”

In order to overcome the paradox, Russell introduced the notion of a “logical type.” The basic idea is that a set S of a certain logical type T can contain as members only entities of a type lower than T. This idea was implemented in what was later known as the “simple” theory of types. Russell and Whitehead nevertheless thought that paradoxes of a broader kind resulted from the vicious circle that arises when an object is defined by means of quantifiers (logical symbols corresponding to the ordinary-language terms “all” or “every” and “some” or “at least one”) whose scope or values include the defined object itself. Russell’s paradox itself incorporates such a self-referring, or “impredicative,” definition; the injunction to avoid them was called by Russell the “vicious circle principle.” It was implemented by Russell and Whitehead by further complicating the type-structure of higher-order objects, resulting in what came to be known as the “ramified” theory of types. In addition, in order to show that all of the usual mathematics can be derived in their system, Russell and Whitehead were forced to introduce a special assumption, called the axiom of reducibility, that implies a partial collapse of the ramified hierarchy. Although the ramified theory avoided contradictions such as Russell’s paradox, it was (and remains) extraordinarily difficult to understand.

Principia Mathematica is a herculean attempt to demonstrate mathematically what The Principles of Mathematics had argued for philosophically. The validity of the individual formal proofs that make up the bulk of its three volumes has gone largely unchallenged, but the philosophical significance of the work as a whole is still a matter of debate. Does it demonstrate that mathematics is logic trivial truisms upon which Russell had originally intended to build mathematics. Moreover, the first incompleteness theorem (1931) of the Austrian-born mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel (1906–78) proves that there cannot be a single logical theory from which the whole of mathematics is derivable: all consistent theories of arithmetic are necessarily incomplete. Principia Mathematica cannot, however, be dismissed as nothing more than a heroic failure. Its influence on the development of mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics has been immense.

In philosophy the greatest impact of Principia Mathematica has been through its so-called theory of descriptions. This method of analysis, first introduced by Russell in his article “On Denoting” (1905), translates propositions containing definite descriptions (e.g., “the present king of France”) into expressions that do not—the purpose being to remove the logical awkwardness of appearing to refer to things (such as the present king of France) that do not exist. Originally developed by Russell as part of his efforts to overcome the contradictions in his theory of logic, this method of analysis has since become widely influential even among philosophers with no specific interest in mathematics. The general idea at the root of Russell’s theory of descriptions—that the grammatical structures of ordinary language are distinct from, and often conceal, the true “logical forms” of expressions—has become his most enduring contribution to philosophy.