ABSTRACT
Mr. Russell: You could not give a general definition if it is right that negativeness is an ultimate.
You will remember that after speaking about atomic propositions I pointed out two more complicated forms of propositions which arise immediately on proceeding further than that: the first, which I call molecular propositions, which I dealt with last time, involving such words as “or”, “and”, “if”, and the second involving two or more verbs such as believing, wishing, willing, and so forth. In the case of molecular propositions it was not clear that we had to deal with any new form of fact, but only with a new form of proposition, i.e. if you have a disjunctive proposition such as “p or q” it does not seem very plausible to say that there is in the world a disjunctive fact corresponding to “p or q” but merely that there is a fact corresponding to p and a fact corresponding to q, and the disjunctive proposition derives its truth or falsehood from those two separate facts. Therefore in that case one was dealing only with a new form of proposition and not with a new form of fact. Today we have to deal with a new form of fact.
