THE SYNTACTIC PRIORITY THESIS

Some philosophers have held that language, which is taken to include logic, is the only guide we have to the nature of the world. Russell divided philosophers into three classes on the issue of the relation of language to the world. The second and third classes are not very promising, but the first consists of “those who infer properties of the world from properties of language”, “a very distinguished party” Russell called them. He then says: “If, therefore, we are confined to the above three alternatives, we must make the best of the first. ”

Presumably it is for such reasons that Russell concluded that facts are objects we come across in the world, and that Wittgenstein concluded the world is composed primarily of facts. Facts are things in the world that correspond to sentences in language. The reason for thinking that facts are ontologically significant is, presumably, that sentences are linguistically significant.

Later the principle that Russell understood as characterizing the first class of philosophers became known as the syntactic priority thesis. It arises in the discussion of Frege's philosophy, and it is regarded as how Frege characterized, and presumably justified, the concept–object distinction, and also, at a lower level, how he determined which classes of things were classes of objects. It can therefore have two roles.