I was listening to Rusty Quill Gaming, and a character they have, Sir Bertram MacGuffin, reminded me of Bertrand Russell. I have no idea why, but let’s charge on…Russell said some interesting things about the meaning of sentences, which may have effects in the spoken component of spellcasting.
So, Russell starts off being big on Meinong, who has his own episode. He likes the idea that a word is defined by the thing it denotes. It does not, crucially, reflect an object out in the Realm of Forms. Russell isn’t a fan of the emporium that is Meinong’s Jungle. His initial way around this is to suggest that words don’t denote things. Well, actually only four words denote things: this; that; these; those. The other words which you think are denoting things are actually just describing them. When you cast a spell on an orange, Russell’s argument is that you are casting a spell of that thing (denotation) which is an orange (description),
Russell’s longer form of this argument is that when you say “The current king of France is bald” you sense it is false, but what’s the logical form of the argument for falseness? You can’t test it. He argues that this appears to be a single sentence, but is actually three.
- There is a type of thing which is “King of France”.
- That thing which uniquely has the properties of “King of France” is the King of France.
- A property of the thing mentioned above is baldness.
The second line is to take care of the “the”. in the original sentence – and it’s the one which fails when a modern person is targeting “The King of France”. Meinong’s Jungle may well have a “King of France” in it, because its something you can coherently discuss, but that doesn’t mean that in a realistic, denotative, sense, there is a person who is the king of France.
Russell uses this to enforce a sort of bivalency in his language. There is either a King of France, or not a King of France: there is no quality of King of Francishness which is seeping out of the Magic Realm into the material, as per Plato and Meinong. When you say “I cast a Pilum of Fire at my enemy.” you are clearly in Russell’s sort of world, because the magic spirit that guides the pilum doesn’t go through a list of who you hate most to find what you mean by “enemy”. There’s an implied “that enemy”, and the spirit follows that implication unless you fumble the spell. This is also handy because it prevents self-reference in Perdo Vim spells.
So, grammatical form seems to be different from logical form in Mythic Europe, because we are playing in modern English. The magi do seem to know: they have spotted there’s a difference between signifier and signified, because they have translated spells into multiple languages. They also know faeries speak a language that is basically a jumble of metasyntax, so that people hear what is intended in their own language, rather than in a separate, Faerie language.
For Russell, from this emerges the idea of a “logical fiction”. Logical fictions are things we can talk about, and they have meaning, and are embodied, but in a real sense don’t exist. They function is a shorthand for complexity. An example is when we discuss what a committee, or covenant, decides. The committee really doesn’t decide anything: each person on the committee decides and this gets aggregated. Similarly, the average grog in a covenant may have 1.94 legs, but that doesn’t mean a particular grog has 1.94. An “average person” is not embodied in a single person. To me, these logical fictions are a new class of faerie in need to think about. They are a story, after all.
Russell also had an interesting idea on how we know about things. He has two classes of knowing. He denies that to know a thing, you need to completely comprehend the thing: at that level of detail you could never know anything. You either know a thing by personal experience, or you know of a type of thing, and that there is one object which fulfils the description of the thing.
His ideas illuminate a question about the workings of Hermetic magic, which fills in the rough details when you create things. You say you want to make a lion, and you get a lion, even if you only know lions by a drawing in a bestiary. The usual explanation is that the spell gets the extra detail from the Realm of Forms, but that doesn’t make sense, even in Platonic magic, because the whole point of Forms is they don’t have accidents. Plato’s sword is not sharp or blunt, because it has only swordishness, but nothing that is not swordishness. Plato’s lion has no colour, and no appetite, and no fur, because it’s not detailed enough to be material. How can the Form tell you how many hairs are on the head of a lion, or what colour they are? How can you dredge a Form for accidents, when by definition they have none?
Russell says that most things you know, because you are familiar with then. You have direct contact with the thing, or memory of that contact. Your other way of knowing things is because you are aware that there is a type of thing, and that a particular object has the properties of that thing. Your magus knows that Prima of House Tremere is Poena, even though he has never met Poena, because he is aware that there is a class of things called “Primi” which intersects with a class of things called “Tremere magi” and that there is an object which is called Poena that is in the intersection of those classes.
He later suggests your knowledge of types of things derives from acquaintance, so the later type of knowing is due to the accumulation of objects in direct, sensory experience. In much Hermetic magic you can strike things which are in the first class, but not the second, unless you have an Arcane Connection, which allows you to say “That!” to the spirit in your spells. A name is not a definite description, lacking a “that!”, but a True Name is a definite description.
So, to wrap it up, in Russell’s view, the only real things in targeting instructions are: this; that; these; those. Everything else is description. A name is a description. A noun is a description. “I create a lion” is really “I create -this- lion”. The lion is extrapolated from your experience, rather than the form of lions. Arcane connections allow you to state a “this” or “that” beyond you immediate sensory experience. In the gap between the logical and grammatical form is likely a new form of faerie.
Games From Folktales 