The doctrine of internal relations is the philosophical doctrine that all relations are internal to their bearers, in the sense that they are essential to them and the bearers would not be what they are without them. It was a term used in

British philosophy British philosophy refers to the philosophical tradition of the British people. "The native characteristics of British philosophy are these: common sense, dislike of complication, a strong preference for the concrete over the abstract and a certa ...

around in the early 1900s.

Overview

Some relations are clearly internal in the sense that, for example, four would not be four unless it were related to two in the way it is. Some relations are internal to their bearers under one description but not under another, for example, a wife would not be a wife unless suitably related to a husband, but Mary would still be Mary had she not married. Or take the internal relation where Jack is taller than his wife, Joan. Here the relation is internal to both of them together, in symbolic form it can be given as: Jack(R)Joan, where R is the ordered relation of "Taller than". The doctrine that all relations are internal implies that everything has some relation, however distant, to everything else. Such a doctrine is ascribed by

Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ar ...

and

G. E. Moore George Edward Moore (4 November 1873 – 24 October 1958) was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the founders of analytic philosophy. He and Russell led the turn from ideal ...

to certain ideas by

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends ...

and the American philosopher, C. S. Peirce. Russell associates it with

pragmatism Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. ...

, objective idealism and the absolute idealism of Hegel. It also refers to

coherentism In philosophical epistemology, there are two types of coherentism: the coherence theory of truth; and the coherence theory of justification (also known as epistemic coherentism). Coherent truth is divided between an anthropological approach, whi ...

, a holist approach to truth. A contemporary of Russell, the English philosopher,

Alfred North Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found applic ...

, maintained the necessity of a doctrine of internal relations for the theory of

evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

"This material is in itself the ultimate substance. Evolution, on the materialistic theory, is reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modem doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. It also requires an underlying activity -- a substantial activity -- expressing itself in achievements of organism."Whitehead, 1925, pages 151–152. In the 1925 (first) edition of Whitehead's ''Science and the Modern World'' the cited paragraph is on p. 135.

References

{{reflist Metaphysics Idealism

Overview

See also

References