Four schools of propositional logic Collingwood shows presuppose a principle of truth (they support "all the various well-known theories of truth") which he denies one by one86. Remarking in his autobiography, Collingwood wants to substitute a logic of question and answer for a logic of propositions. So question and answer, while they were seen in the the light of historical restoration, now importantly converge with the units of logic over domains shared by Whitehead and Russell. While our ultimate concern is with how question and answer turn into problem and solution, by looking at question and answer as the truth and falsity of propositional arguments, this allows one to put the cloak of Whitehead and Russell over the environment of problems and solutions. That being said, the transformation that follows, rather than is an authorial innovation that lies in mystery, is a more comprehensive development for those in the process of clarification and philosophy.
One must unlock a secret of sorts, which relies on a scientific analogy of the substance ether and its relationship to a knowledge of its properties expressed through physics, and by humans, through their senses. The way that question and answer change to problem and solution is figurative and occurs because both answers and solutions are natural signs in the sensible realm, for respectively, questions and problems in another realm, the ethereal, by which is meant cognitive and electromagnetic space simultaneously. Collingwood says that Leibniz came up with a solution for a problem and that this is the basis of the problem he solved; that the historian in turn argues backward from the solution87. Solutions are thus like tests in the sensible realm for elements in the ethereal realm. And whether detected or not, the ether is said to contain "ripples" according to Oliver Lodge (whose fame to Science rests in his judgments of Earnst Haeckel an influential Darwinian). Ether is a "recondite" substance he remarks, that the blind might go about testing for light as people with sight might test electric waves, for which they do not have a sense organ.
Ripples in the Ether now symbolize static in the radio transmission, as ether, no longer thought to contain light or act in a pair with matter as building blocks of the universe, is used to name a substance in which wireless signals travel. Collingwood and Oliver Lodge wrote in the Twentieth Century ; the first radio message to cross the Atlantic occurred in 1901. Thus technology was beginning to fulfill expectations of metaphysical mythology of extrasensory communication originating behind a late 19th Century society's burgeoning new ideas--about question and answer, about an inventor's solution --it is also a fact that wireless transmission travels out into space, so that our transmission of the solutions of physical science travels from the sensible realm out into the electormagentic and ethereal field of space like a "Telegraphic System of the Universe", no doubt a picture of the pervasity of "pure" substance and magnetism proposed by Lodge.
23.Collingwood, Robin George. An Autobiography. Oxford and London: Oxford
University Press, 1978, 1939. pp. 40-41. 'Suppose... the metaphysician
were talking about the contents of a small mahogany box with
a sliding top; There were two questions: (a) Are the contents
of this box one set of chessmen or many sets? (b) Are the contents
of this box one chessman or many chessmen?
24. Lodge, Oliver. Life and Matter: A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe". London: Williams & Norgate, 1907... the amount of magnetism thus producible being infinite; that is, being strictly without limit, and not dependent at all on the very finite strength of the original magnet, which indeed continues unabated.
86. Collingwood, Robin George. An Autobiography. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1978, 1939. p.36. 'One school of thought holds that a proposition is either true or false simply in itself, trueness or falseness being qualities of propositions. Another school holds that to call it true or false is to assert a relation of 'correspondence'... A third holds that... a fourth school should be mentioned... All these theories of truth I denied....
87. Ibid... p.69-70. If leibniz when he wrote this passage was so confused in his mind as to make a complete mess of the job of solving his problem, he was bound at the same time to mix up his own tracks so completely that no reader could see quite clearly what his problem had been. For one and the same passage states his solution and serves as evidence of what the problem was. The fact that we can identify his problem is proof that he has solved it; for we only know what th problem was by arguing back from the solution.'
24. Lodge, Oliver. Life and Matter: A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe". London: Williams & Norgate, 1907... the amount of magnetism thus producible being infinite; that is, being strictly without limit, and not dependent at all on the very finite strength of the original magnet, which indeed continues unabated.
86. Collingwood, Robin George. An Autobiography. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1978, 1939. p.36. 'One school of thought holds that a proposition is either true or false simply in itself, trueness or falseness being qualities of propositions. Another school holds that to call it true or false is to assert a relation of 'correspondence'... A third holds that... a fourth school should be mentioned... All these theories of truth I denied....
87. Ibid... p.69-70. If leibniz when he wrote this passage was so confused in his mind as to make a complete mess of the job of solving his problem, he was bound at the same time to mix up his own tracks so completely that no reader could see quite clearly what his problem had been. For one and the same passage states his solution and serves as evidence of what the problem was. The fact that we can identify his problem is proof that he has solved it; for we only know what th problem was by arguing back from the solution.'
