It is worth asking, briefly, then, how Russell would have responded to a version of the replacement argument considered in 3. Since Russell thinks that the word "Wisdom" as it occurs in "Wisdom is a virtue" represents the same entity as does "wise" in "Socrates is wise," one might claim that he is then committed to holding that we could replace "Wisdom" with "wise" in "Wisdom is a virtue" while preserving the proposition expressed and thereby also its truth-value. However, "wise is a virtue" does not seem grammatically well-formed, much less to express a true proposition. Russell, however, would remind us that he marks a distinction between occurring as term and occurring as concept . The grammatical form a word takes, while not contributing an(other) entity to the proposition expressed, nevertheless indicates something about the proposition, i.e., what modes of occurring its constituents do have. Because, by grammatical custom, the adjective "wise" is used to indicate the concept Wisdom when it occurs as concept , and the noun "Wisdom" is used when it occurs as term , "wise is a virtue" is awkward and contravenes the grammatical rule. Of course, this series of words might nevertheless be used successfully to express a proposition, e.g., by a child or foreigner who has not mastered the noun/adjective distinction in English. If so, then the proposition in question is the same as that expressed by "Wisdom is a virtue" and has the same truth-value. Indeed, Russell explicitly says that if the verb form "kills" is used in a place usually occupied by a grammatical subject, it means the same thing as would the verbal nouns "Killing" or "to kill" (PoM p. 48).
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