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Early Analytic Philosophy: The history of an illusion

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Early Analytic Philosophy: The history of an illusion

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Content INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. ProQuest Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2001 EARLY ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY THE HISTOR Y OF AN ILL USION by Aaron Mathew Preston A Dissertation Presented to the F A C U L T Y OF THE G R A D U A T E SCHO O L U N IV E R S IT Y OF SOUTHERN C A L IF O R N IA In Partial Fulfillm ent o f the Requirements for the Degree DO C TO R OF PHILO SO PHY (PH ILO SO PH Y) December 2001 Aaron Mathew Preston Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3065834 UMI UMI Microform 3065834 Copyright 2002 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA The Graduate School University Park LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90089 1695 This dissertation, w ritten by --i rV c M c - ' U nder the direction o f h..{ .t~. Dissertation Com m ittee, and approved by a ll its members, has been presented to and accepted by The G raduate School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm en t o f requirem ents fo r the degree o f DO CTOR O F PH ILO SO PH Y / DEthi i o f Graduate Studies Date 12- 17-2001 DJSSER TA TIO N C O M M 1 Chairperson Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Aaron Preston Dallas Willard ABSTRACT EARLY ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY: THE HISTORY OF AN ILLUSION In E a rly Analytic Philosophy. I argue that scientism and the scientistic worldv iew played a much more substantial role in the origination and early development o f Analytic Philosophy than is usually acknowledged. By focusing on the drive toward scientism as the principal motive underlying the origination and development o f Analytic Philosophy, we can see how the various figures and factions which are usually counted as the main contributors to the origination and early development of Analytic Philosophy might be seen as one united confluence, and how they complemented each other in bringing about the supposed ■'revolution in philosophy" with which Analytic Philosophy is commonly associated. Arguably. Analytic Philosophy owes its position o f dominance in Anglo-American philosophical culture to the fact that it was once taken to be a revolutionary philosophical movement; and it was taken to be such in virtue o f its novel linguistic metaphilosophy. Analytic Philosophy's position o f dominance has recently been threatened by questions about its nature and legitimacy. Since it abandoned its linguistic character, it seems that there has been no good answer to the question What is Analytic Philosophy? I argue that Analytic Philosophy has never been a unified philosophical movement, and that the popular view that it is and/or once was such a movement is an illusion created by a scientistically-biased misreading o f Figures central to the Analytic tradition. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Contents INTRODUCTION PART I: THE CRISES IN A N A LY T IC PHILOSOPHY......................................... 7 1. Tin: Id e n t it y C risis in A n a ly t ic Ph il o s o p h y..............................................8 1.1 The Idea o f a C ris is ...........................................................................................8 1.2 The Crisis Viewed Systematically................................................................12 1.3 The Crisis Viewed H istorically..................................................................... 15 1.4 Crisis Present and Crisis Past........................................................................25 2. a n a l y t ic Ph ilo s o p h y: Conceptions an d M isc o n c eptio n s.................. 27 2.1 A Crisis W ithin the C ris is ............................................................................. 27 2.2 The Popular Conception o f Analytic Philosophy....................................... 28 2.3 The Contemporary Interest in Analytic Philosophy...................................33 2.4 The Contemporary Trend in Defining Analytic Philosophy.....................34 2.5 The Alternative to the Contemporary Trend...............................................54 2.6 T he Popular Conception Expanded.............................................................. 56 PART II: SC IENTISM AS TH E DRIVING FORCE BEHIND A N A L Y T IC P H ILO S O P H Y ...............................................................................................................67 3. T r a d it io n a l Ph il o s o p h y .................................................................................68 4. T ill CHALLENGE OF THE MODERN SCIENCES................................................. 76 4.1. Why focus on science?..................................................................................76 4.2 T he Newtonian Breakthrough......................................................... 83 4.3 T he Scientistic Drive in Modern Thought......................................86 4.4 T he Effects o f Scientism on Other Fields o f Know ledge.............47 4.5 The Effects o f Scientism on Philosophy........................................44 4.6 The Alliance w ith Psychology, and its Dissolution................... 108 4.7 The Ambiguous Position o f the Empirical Philosophy, and its Disambiguation..................................................................................................... 116 4.8 The Crisis in Philosophy at the End o f the Nineteenth Century.................132 5. Sc ie n t is m in the Emergence: of a n a l y t ic Philosophy l: T he: L in g c is t ic T hesis a n d its Suppor ters..........................................................1 44 5.1 Meeting the Challenge, Averting the Crisis: Scientism in the Linguistic Thesis.................................................................................................. 144 5.2 Scientism in the Supporters o f the Linguistic Thesis.............................. 153 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 6. Sc ie n t is m in run Em e r g e n c e - : o f A n a l y t ic Ph il o s o p h y 2: C r l a u n c ; t h e I l l u s io n o f U n i t y ................................................................................178 6.1 Metaphilosophical and Metaphysical Differences Among Core Analytic Figures...................................................................................................178 6.2 flow and Why these Differences were O verlooked.............................. 144 6.3 Indirect Passive Contributions in Moore.................................................. 147 6.4 Indirect Passive Contributions in Russell.................................................. 203 6.5 Direct Passive Contributions in Moore and Russell................................ 218 6.6 The Nature o f the Active Contribution..................................................... 220 6.7 Scientism as the Main Cause o f the Illu sio n ............................................234 7. Co n c lu s io n ....................................................................................................... 238 B ih i.io h r a p h y......................................................................................................... 252 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction The follow ing work attempts to remedy a problem in historical work on Analytic Philosophy. It seems to me that many o f the existing treatments o f the history o f A nalytic Philosophy leave something to be desired. One expects from a work which purports to be the historv o f an event that it w ill provide not only exposition but explanation, e.g.. a historv o f W orld War II. in addition to an exposition o f facts about the time and location o f particular battles, how they were fought, and how many casualties were sustained, ought to include some mention o f Nazism and its central tenets. O nly in light o f the latter can the former be adequately understood, and both are required for an adequate understanding o f the event called W orld War II. It is precisely this latter kind o f explanation that is lacking in main works on the history o f analytic philosophy. I ’ntil recent years, no attempt at all was made in works on Analvtic Philosophy to discuss the deeper motives and ideas that originally unified Analytic Philosopln. Take, for example, one o f the earliest attempts at doing historical w ork on the linguistic turn, a book called The Revolution in Philosophy. The book consists in nine short essays, six o f w hich are expositions o f specific figures, groups or schools that played an important role in the linguistic turn: P. I I. Bradley. Frege, the Logical Atomism o f Russell and Wittgenstein I. G. L. Moore. The Vienna Circle, and Wittgenstein II. These are largely standard expositions o f the main tenets o f the views o f the person, group, or school. Occasionally, one or another o f these essays w ill include a helpful comment about the motivation or rationale o f the person, group, or school in question: e.g.. about Bradley's view o f the relation o f philosophy to psychology, and about Russell's assumption that thought was to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. be studied via language; but tliese themes are left largely undeveloped. Thus, these essays are helpful i f what one is looking for is an exposition o f this or that person, group, or school. Howe\er. i f one is seeking to see these separate influences as one united confluence, if one is looking to learn how these distinct forces are related, and. particularly, how they complemented each other in bringing about the "revolution in philosophy." they are not very helpful at all. One might suppose that the task o f putting it all together must fall to one or more o f the three remaining essays; Ryle's introduction. Strawson's essay on "Construction and .Analysis." or W arnock's essay on "Analysis and Imagination"; but here again we are disappointed. Though they are broader in scope than the six "specific" essays, not one o f them e\en attempts to give the kind of explanation I am interested in. Ry le's introduction is. in my opinion, the most helpful essay in the book. It offers a sketch o f ( I ) the changing social milieu around the time o f the linguistic turn. (2) the developments in philosophy that gave impetus to the turn, including (a) Frege's and Bradley's revolt against psychologism, (b) the reevaluation o f the nature o f thoughts/judgments as "functional unities" instead o f as bundles o f terms, (c) insights into the "m anifold differences o f logical form" (Ryle l% 3 . p. "). (d) new ideas about truth and its relation to meaning, and (e) the elevation o f meaning to a place o f prominence in philosophical discourse. But it is just a sketch. Like the six specific essay s, Ry le's introduction fails to explain either the interconnectedness o f these philosophical developments or how their cumulative force resulted in the linguistic turn. Strawson's essay suffers from similar failings. Fie first makes an attempt at identify ing the common ground o f the various persons, groups, or schools discussed in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. six specific essays. These "all have something in common." he says. ” e\en if it is only a word to be pronounced with approval. The word is 'analysis'" (Strawson l% 3 . p. 97). Indeed, the unity o f these persons, groups, and schools goes not much farther than the word "analysis." for. as Strawson explains, their respective conceptions o f what analysis involves were quite different. Some thought that the objects o f analysis were sentences, others propositions, others thoughts/beliefs, and still others, statements. A ll Strawson really succeeds in doing is drawing attention to a (rather thin) point o f unity, in itself philosophically unimportant, among the diverse persons, groups, or schools active in the “ revolution." He gives no clear explanation o f why this unity exists, i.e.. why they were all pronouncing the word “ analysis" with approval. As a second example o f the deficiency o f existing works on the history o f analytic philosophy , take Michael Dummett’s Origins o f Analytical Philosophy. Dummett claims that "w hat distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the beliet. first, that a philosophical account o f thought can be attained through a philosophical account o f language, and. secondly , that a comprehensive account can only be so attained" (Dummett 1993, p. 4). What Dummett does not explain is why analytic philosophers have believed that thought can or must be studied via the medium o f language. The decision to study a thing mediately seems to suggest the belief that it cannot be studied immediately: thus, in the case o f thought, the decision to study it via language seems to suggest the belief that it cannot be gotten at directly . Thus taking the linguistic turn seems to presuppose a rejection o f introspection as a means o f studying thought. But Dummett explains neither whether this was a motivation in the linguistic turn nor. if it was. w in it was. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4 A second theme in Dummett's book is the notion that truth is essentiall\ connected with meaning. Dummett takes this to be partially explanatory o f the linguistic turn: but it only succeeds in being explanatory when it is combined with the assumption that meaning is essentially linguistic. The reasons for making this assumption about meaning are not ob\ ious. and Dummett's book does nothing to make them clear. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a surge in historical scholarship on Analytic Philosophy. Many o f the works that emerged during this period ha\e tried to be explanatory in the way earlier works were not; but these have their own set o f problems which 1 w ill discuss in chapters I and 2. My goal is to be explanatory while avoiding the errors o f recent scholarship. In short, my thesis is that the rise o f Analytic Philosophy is best understood as part o f what has been, for at least 300 years now. an ongoing cycle in philosophy. The cycle I have in mind can be described as the one created by scientistically minded philosophers trying, failing, and trying again, to come up with a scientific philosophy. In the wake o f the phenomenal success o f the empirical sciences during the 17"'. I S'1 ', and nineteenth centuries, both in terms o f their contributions to the quality o f human life and in terms o f their contributions to knowledge, scientific knowledge became the ideal in many fields. Philosophy was not unaffected by this trend, and many philosophers felt the need to construct a scientific philosophy. Moreover, as the sciences advanced, philosophy retreated. Slowly, the view came to prevail that philosophy was not the queen but the handmaiden o f the sciences. This view is expressed, for example, by John Locke: The Commonwealth o f Learning, is not at this time without Master- Builders. whose mighty Designs, in advancing the Sciences, w ill leave lasting Monuments to the Adm iration o f Posterity : But every one must not Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham: and in an age that produces such Masters, as the Great Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton. ... tis Ambition enough to be employed as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some o f the Rubbish, that lies in the wav to knowledge: .... (Locke 1975. p. 10) I'll is kind o f deference to empirical science, which in an extreme form is sometimes called scientism, was a major factor in brining about the linguistic turn and the rise o f Analytic Philosophy. The role o f scientism and scientistically amenable views in later Analytic Philosophy, from say the 1960s onward, has been addressed by a number o f recent authors. I). S. Clarke, for example, has recently discussed the dominance o f materialism in Analytic metaphysics since the 1960s in great detail (Clarke 1997). Putnam discusses the dominance o f scientism with special attention to issues in cognitive science, philosophv o f mind and philosophv o f language in Renewing Philosophy. "Analytic philosophv." he savs. has become increasingly dominated by the idea that science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent o f perspective. To be sure, there are within analytic philosophv important figures who combat this scientism: one has only to mention Peter Strawson, or Saul Kripke. or John M cDowell, or Michael Dummett. Nevertheless, the idea that science leaves no room for an independent philosophical enterprise has reached the point at which leading practitioners sometimes suggest that all that is left for philosophv is to try to anticipate what the presumed scientific solutions to all metaphysical problems w ill eventually look like. (Putnam 1992. pp. ix f.) Likewise. Dallas W illard has recently claimed that "the intellectual and cultural workspace which they [i.e.. the early Analysts, among others] seared out w ithin the American Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 6 academic and professional world is now in large part occupied by what max be ealled a new scientism" (W illard 1998. p.28). However, it is rare to see scientism mentioned as a major influence in early A nalytic Philosophy. Even when it is mentioned, its role is not usually made the object o f historical exposition. I am aware o f only one work that attempts to do so: Nicolas C'apaldi's The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation (C'apaldi 2000). which appeared part-way through the w riting o f the present work. C'apaldi demonstrates, successfully in my view, the theoretical and historical connections between the philosophes o f the French enlightenment and the Logical Positivists o f the Vienna Circle. C'apaldi's \ iews complement my own. but it seems to me that the influence o f scientism on early A nalytic Philosophy was much more pervasive than what can be seen by looking only at the connection between the philosophes. the "enlightenment project" which they embodied, and the Logical Positivists. Both, it seems to me. were caught up in a broader cultural phenomenon which I call the drive toward scientism, and which I w ill discuss in chapter 4. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7 Part I: The Crises In Analytic Philosophy Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. s I. The Identity Crisis in Analytic Philosophy /. / The Idea o f a Crisis It is sometimes said that philosophv has undergone two great resolutions in its history: first, the Cartesian revolution in which epistemology unseated ontology as the primary or fundamental field o f philosophical inquiry: and second, the so-called "linguistic turn" o f the early twentieth century, wherein language came to be seen as the proper subject-matter o f philosophy. It is generally accepted that the rise o f what is now called "A nalytic Philosophy is closely connected with this second philosophical resolution. Strangely. though, over the latter half o f its approximately 100-sear histors. Analvtic Philosophv has been slowly but progressively disavossing the doctrines and practices sshich ssere originally its most revolutionary features. In this progressive disavowal, we see the disintegration of Analytic Philosophv as a unified philosophical school or movement. As Richard Rortv has observed: most o f those who call themselves "analytic philosophers" would now reject the epithet "linguistic philosophers" and would not describe themselves as "applying linguistic methods." Analytic philosophy is now the name not o f the application o f such methods to philosophical problems, but simply o f the particular set o f problems being discussed by philosophy professors in certain parts o f the world. (Rorty 1992. p. 374. note 9) "D isintegration" in its most literal and etym ologically grounded sense precisely captures what has happened in Analytic Philosophy. Normally, a philosophical school or movement can be identified in terms o f a common set o f tenets, or at least in terms o f a common set o f practices or methods w hich suggest or reflect a common set o f tenets; or. at Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the verv least, a common set o f interests. In virtue o f these commonalities, the members o f a school or movement can be said to be united, or unified, or integrated; and. o f course, it is in virtue o f this unity that there is said to exist a school or movement. In the case o f Analvtic Philosophv'. what was once perceived to be a genuine philosophical school has lost its unity and has become something which no one. it seems, knows how to classify. Lven the set ot problems to which Rorty refers is really nothing more than a loose and variable amalgam o f issues, so that Analvtic Philosophv cannot even be identified in terms of a set o f common interests. fo be sure. Analv tic Philosophv is still thought of by most as being a philosophical school, or at least something like a school— a distinctive way o f doing philosophv. perhaps. This notion is reinforced by the fact that contemporary Analvtic Philosophv can be identified negatively, in terms o f opposition to so-called Continental Philosophv. However, the grounds o f this opposition are as vague as the grounds o f the unity o f Analvtic Philosophv. and the fact remains that 110 positive body o f doctrine, methodological or substantive, nor any definite body o f interests, can be found to ju stify regarding contemporary Analytic Philosophy as unified in any way. Some have taken the present "disintegrated" state o f Analvtic Philosophv to be tantamount to a crisis. A recent work on the origins and history o f Analv tic Philosophv begins with the follow ing statement: It seems beyond argument that analytic philosophv has been, for some time now, in a state o f crisis— dealing with its self-image, its relationships with philosophical alternatives, its fruitfulness and even legitimacy in the general philosophical community. (B iletzki and Matar 1998, p. xi) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 10 I lie idea that there is a crisis in Analytic Philosophy formed the basis for a recent conference at the University o f Southampton, where there now exists a Centre for Post- Analvtical Philosophy. The Centre's advertisement reads: In recent years a feeling has been growing that the analytic tradition in philosophy, once proudly dominant and disdainful o f other traditions, has been undergoing a crisis. Manifestations o f this crisis can be seen in the debate now raging among analytic philosophers about what. exactlv. the method o f analysis is. and also in the growing interest among analvtic philosophers in so-called 'Continental' philosophv . Perhaps the heralding o f a post-analytic era is premature. Nonetheless, even such eminent Analytic philosophers as Hilary Putnam and Jaakko Hintikka seem to believe that something is seriously wrong with the present state o f Analvtic Philosophv. so much so that its verv survival is at stake. Putnam admits to "a conv iction that the present situation in [Analvtic| philosophv is one that calls for a revitalization, a renewal, o f the subject" (Putnam 1992. p. ix). As recently as 1998, Putnam was still wishing that Analytic philosophv would change its course (Putnam 1998). S im ilarly. Hintikka has confessed: 'M believe that we have to make a new start in practically all branches o f philosophical studies including logic, foundations o f mathematics, language theory, epistemologv. and philosophical methodology" and "I strongly believe that the survival o f analvtic philosophv depends on philosophers' acknowledgement and utilization o f [the opportunities for constructive philosophv to be found in Wittgenstein's later thought]" (Hintikka 1998. p. 260). The idea that Analvtic Philosophv is in a state o f crisis is interesting fo ra number o f reasons. First, though to some it may seem beyond argument that Analvtic Philosophv is in such a state, there is really very little in philosophv that is beyond argument. To Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. philosophers who self-identify as Analvtic. and whose philosophical careers have been taken up in working on a problem or set o f problems which seem, at least to them, indigenous to A nalytic Philosophy, the idea that Analvtic Philosophv is in a state o f crisis may seem absurd. For them, discussion o f these problems continues much as it always has (w ithin the scope o f their own philosophical involvement, at least), and there is no reason to think that the discussion is in danger o f coming to an end. How then, they might ask. could there be a crisis in Analvtic Philosophy? 1 1 One possible reason for rejecting the idea that there is a crisis in Analvtic Philosophv is its continuing strength as a sociological phenomenon. Brian Leiter (o f The Philosophical (nnirmet Report fame) cites this fact as evidence that Analvtic Philosophv is alive and well: Although it appears to be a widespread view in the humanities that 'analvtic' philosophv is 'dead' or 'dying.' the professional situation o f analvtic philosophv simply does not bear this out. A ll the Ivy League universities, a ll the leading state research universities, a ll the University o f California campuses, most o f the top liberal arts colleges, most o f the flagship campuses o f the second-tier state research universities boast philosophy departments that overwhelmingly self-identify as ’analvtic’ : it is hard to imagine a 'movement' that is more academically and professionally entrenched than analvtic philosophy. (Leiter 2000) t)t course, this sociological fact is philosophically irrelevant to its vitality as a philosophical school. The vitality o f a philosophical school does not depend on the use o f a name, professional entrenchment, or cultural prestige, but on adherence to a definite philosophical view or set o f views. The fact that many people find it desirable to label themselves as "'A nalytic" shows that Analytic Philosophv is alive and well as a school o f philosophy only if being Analytic involves adhering to a certain philosophical theory or set o f theories. In the present context, it seems that being Analvtic involves no such thing, and this is what creates the w orry about it. No one is denying the fact that Analytic Philosophv as a sociological phenomenon is alive and well. It is its status as a philosophical school that is in question. O f course, on the view that Analvtic Philosophv has no philosophical unitv. and hence no legitim acy as a philosophical school, the appropriateness or legitim acy o f Analvtic Philosophy's sociological vitality might be called into question: but the mere fact o f it is not in question, and is irrelevant to the question o f the crisis. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The attempt to answer this question and the kind o f dialogue that might develop around it promise to be philosophically interesting. The first step in establishing such a dialogue would be to indicate clearly the issues involved in the alleged c ris is / I shall now turn to this task. 1.2 The Crisis Viewed Systematically As the quotations at the beginning o f § 1.1 indicate, the issues that constitute the crisis range from pragmatic concerns about the fruitfulness o f Analytic Philosophy to more theoretical concerns about its subject-matter and its methods. I take the fundamental issue in the crisis to be the repeated failure— suggesting inability— o f Analytic Philosophy to adequately define itself in terms o f its subject-matter and its methods. This failure is closely related in an obvious way to the pragmatic concerns which also count as crisis ' This is not d ifficu lt to do. as the above quotations reveal: but Analytic philosophers have tended to lack an awareness o f them. This is because awareness o f the crisis-issues comes mainly from kinds o f interest or consciousness which characteristically have not been encouraged or cultivated within Analytic Philosophy— e.g.. from an interest in very general issues concerning the nature and methods o f philosophical inquiry, or from a kind o f historical consciousness which has traditionally been deemed unnecessary for doing good work in Analytic Philosophy. The real d ifficu lt) is to convince an Analvtic philosopher that these issues merit attention, let alone constitute a crisis. F.ven if an Analvtic philosopher is aware o f the crisis-issues. accepting that they constitute a crisis requires that one grant those issues a degree o f importance that they characteristically have been denied in Analvtic Philosophy. For a long while, the slogan "d o n 't ask what philosophv is— do some" expressed the prevailing attitude among Analvtic philosophers. Although this attitude is no longer m ilitantly defended or promulgated in A nalytic circles, its influence is still present in Analvtic practice insofar as many contemporary Analytic philosophers seem to feel that they can continue working on their specialized problems without first working out adequate solutions to the crisis-issues. At best they are included among the "set o f problems" that Analvtic philosophers are interested in, but their solution is not regarded as essential to the proper functioning o f philosophical investigation. Indeed, disagreement over the existence o f a crisis reveals a deeper disagreement over what is philosophically important, what constitutes "good" philosophv. and ultim ately over the nature o f philosophv itself. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. issues. Generally speaking, what one can produce is limited by the raw material at one's disposal and the "tools" one is able to use to manipulate the raw material. In am field o f knowledge, the subject matter provides the raw material, and the method is the primary tool used to manipulate it. Thus subject m atter and method have a great deal to do w ith the fruitfulness o f a Held. or. in the case o f A nalvtic Philosophy, a school. One wav to characterize philosophv is by noting its unique role in prescribing subject-matter for all fields o f inquiry, including itself. Michael Corrado explains: What /.v if that psychology- Joes.' is not a psychological question, and What is if that physics does'/ is not a question for pin sics to answer. ... But What is the subject-matter o f philosophy? is a philosophical question. Consequently some writers, in trying to say what philosophv is. have said something like this: It is the field in which investigators are entitled by their official capacity to ask. What am I doing? (Corrado 1975. p. x) III is is one o f the questions with which Analvtic Philosophy is now struggling, and it is struggling in part because it has rejected most o f the things which, in the past, have provided philosophv with a distinctive subject-matter. In Part II o f this work. I w ill attempt to explain how and why this rejection took place. For now it w ill suffice to say that the answ ers o f traditional philosophers were rejected w holesale by the early Analysts, the answers o f the early Analysts were rejected by later Analysts, and there is now no w idespread agreement as to what now the answer should be. I'lie failure o f Analytic Philosophv in this regard has recently been discussed bv Tyler Burge, in his 1999 Presidential Address to the Western Division o f the APA (Burge 1999). The bulk o f twentieth-century philosophv. he claims, busied its e lf with deflating humanity, and. along with it. philosophv. To demonstrate what he is getting at. Burge presents a fictional dialogue between a Philosophv Professor— Professor C aruittup. who is Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. clearly the embodiment o f twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy— and a prospective philosophy student. In the course o f this dialogue. Professor Carwittup manages to dismiss as antiquated or unscientific every topic in which the prospective student suggests he might be interested: the search for the meaning o f life, the quest for truth, the attempt to discover a rational basis for moral evaluation, or to come to an understanding o f free w ill, consciousness, or personal identity— all are written o ff as the pipe-dreams o f a now defunct discipline, viz.. traditional philosophy. The dialogue comes to a close with Professor Carwittup's statement that "philosophy is in the business o f showing that it has no business being in business" (Burge 1999. p. 28). Burge's dialogue makes reference to a number o f problems with contemporary Analytic Philosophy. Some o f these are o f the "touchy-feely" variety, which Analytic philosophers are apt to disregard. For example, at one point Burge's student complains that he cannot think o f him self as "some biologically programmed gush o f emotion." Here it is easy enough for a contemporary Analytic philosopher to simply write the student o ff as failing to be sufficiently tough-minded. But other problems are o f a more hard-nosed variety. One clear example is the problem raised in Professor Carwittup's closing statement, viz.. that there seems to be no subject-matter left for philosophy. Bv the twentieth century , most o f what for millennia had belonged to the estate o f philosophv had been divided up and sold, mainly to the natural sciences— or. rather, it had been "discovered" that philosophy had long been a squatter on land to which the natural sciences held the deed. This process was accompanied by a number o f revisionary movements which claimed to have discovered the proper subject-matter and methods for philosophy. The most important o f these revisions, at least for the purposes o f Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 5 understanding the history- o f Analytic Philosophy, is what has come to be known as the linguistic turn. In its day. the linguistic turn was heralded as a revolution in philosophy . As we shall see. the revolution consisted in a substantive and methodological shift away from traditional philosophy— in other words, it consisted in the provision o f a novel answer to the question H hat is it that philosophy docs? Philosophy was conceived to be a wholly linguistic enterprise, a matter o f operating upon language with language. W ith the acceptance of this new view came the rejection o f the traditional conception o f philosophy , its subject matter and its methods. The widespread acceptance this new view o f philosophy initially enjoyed eventually began to taper oft. Problems arose which required the rev ision o f the linguistic thesis. Over the course o f roughly 40 years, the linguistic thesis was revised a number o f times, bach rev ision grew out o f a rejection o f earlier formulations. By the 1070s. the linguistic thesis had largely been abandoned by Anglo-American philosophers, and w ith it. apparently, the drive to define a clear subject-matter for philosophy. Now. however, the drive seems to be reemerging. And in the face o f it. Analytic Philosophv has nothing coin incing to say. 1.3 The Crisis I "tewed H istorically In v j 1.1. Putnam and Hintikka were cited as calling for what amounts to a reformation o f Analy tic Philosophy. The goal o f reformation— as opposed to rev olution, for example— is to preserve some system or order (an institution, a tradition, etc.) by eliminating characteristics w ithin it that, whether because they diminish or inhibit its usefulness or for some other reason, are seen to be undesireable. To do this responsibly Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and with any reasonable hope o f success requires an accurate assessment o f the order to be reformed. Its essence, so to speak, must be distinguished from its accidents, and the culpable accidents must then be distinguished from the innocent: for i f we eliminate an essential feature o f the order, we fail to preserve it. and hence fail truly to reform it. while i f we eliminate innocent accidents instead o f guilty ones, we fail to achieve the aim o f reformation. Clearlv. then, the present situation is one that calls for a careful study o f the nature ol Analvtic Philosophy. But. since Analytic Philosophy is an historical phenomenon, the nature of Analytic Philosophy must be investigated historically. When we seek to answer the question What is Analytic PhilosophyA we must not limit our investigation to vvlutt now goes by that name: for Analytic Philosophy, considered as a recognized philosophical school or movement, has been with us for roughly a centurv now. We must include in our batch of samples from which we distill, as it were, the essence o f Analvtic Philosophv not only contemporary representatives o f the Analvtic school, but also historical representatives. It is not surprising, therefore, that, as the need for an adequate characterization o f Analytic Philosophy has increased, so have the number o f publications on the history— or at least on portions o f the history— of Analvtic Philosophy (e.g.. Corrado 1975: Baker and Hacker 1984: Hylton 1990: Charlton 1991; G riffin 1991; Dummett 1993: Clarke 1997: Follesdal 1997: M onk 1997; Hacker 1997. 1998. etc.). Despite the amount o f recent work devoted to the task, the nature o f Analvtic Philosophv remains obscure. It seems that there is no good answer to the fundamental question What is Analytic Philosophy? Perhaps the best-known answer to this question is Michael Dummett's. It is not an easy thing to say precisely what Dum mett's view is. In Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. one place (Dummett 1993. p. 4 f.). he seems to allow that there is a strict sense and a loose sense o f "analytic philosophy." Strictly speaking Analvtic Philosophv is just that school o f philosophv whose members adhere to the following two axioms: (1) it is possible to develop a philosophical account o f thought via a philosophical account o f language, and (2) a philosophical account o f language is a necessary part o f a comprehensive account o f thought. In the loose sense. Analvtic Philosophy is a philosophical culture populated by philosophers who share a certain philosophical style and who appeal to certain writers but not others.' It turns out. o f course, that the strict sense is the one that really matters for doing serious work on the history and scope o f Analvtic Philosophv . But the strict sense is later revised. when he claims that the "fundamental axiom o f analytical philosophv [is| that the only route to the analysis o f thought goes through the analysis o f language” (ibid.. p. 128). This is neither equivalent to nor entailed by the two axioms given in the first formulation of the strict sense o f "analv tic philosophy," w hether we take them individually ' Brian Leiter has tried to work out what it means to be Analytic in terms o f "style." but it is not clear just what a style is. and is doubtful whether it is philosophically relevant. Leiter says: ’ A n alytic’ philosophv today names a style o f doing philosophv. not a philosophical program or a set o f substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision: draw freely on the tools o f logic: and often identity, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities. (Leiter 2000) This sort o f stylistic unity is not the unity proper to a philosophical school. The stylistic unity is merely accidental unless it is grounded in some sort o f theory— at least a theory about philosophical style. But a theory about philosophical style, it seems, could only be justified in relation to a theory about the aims and methods o f philosophizing: and here we reach the level o f metaphilosophical theory. So. stylistic unity is irrelevant to the vitality o f a philosophical school unless it is grounded in a definite metaphilosophical theory. in which case the metaphilosophical theory is the real ground o f unitv. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 18 or jointlv. Nonetheless, this third axiom seems to be Dummett's real view, since it coheres with statements lie makes elsewhere. For example, he claims that "analytical philosophy was born when the "linguistic turn' was taken" (ibid. . p. 5): and he locates the first instance ot this in Frege's work. Since, for Frege, thoughts were not mental events, but timeless, objective, abstract entities, they were not accessible to introspection, and thev could onlv be studied via language, just as Dummett's third axiom claims. It also coheres with a famous passage in which he expresses his views on the nature o f philosophv: Only with Frege was the proper object o f philosophy finally established: namely, first that the goal o f philosophy is the analysis o f thought: secondly that the study o f thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study o f the psychological process o f thinking: and finally that the only proper method for analyzing thought consists in the analysis o f language. (Dummett 1978. p. 458) lo my knowledge, this is Dummett's clearest and most complete statement about the nature o f philosophv. Analytic Philosophy, on Dummett's view, originated in Frege's acceptance o f these three propositions, which cohere perfectly with his third axiom. Thus I take it that the third axiom expresses his actual view o f Analytic Philosophv. The adequacy o f Dummett's strict definition has become the subject o f debate. For example. Ray Monk has argued that, on Dummett's characterization, even Bertrand Russell fails to qualify as an Analytic philosopher (M onk 1997). Insofar as Russell is widely considered to be a patriarch o f Analvtic Philosophy. M onk's argument amounts to a reiluctio ad absurdum o f Dummett's strict definition. A sim ilar argument could be made putting G. F. Moore in the place o f Russell. Beyond this, Dummett's interpretation o f Frege has recently been challenged (Flacker 1997. pp. 52 fi: Baker & Flacker 1985. 1984. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 19 1987. 1989). so that perhaps even Frege fails to meet the criteria Dummett purports to draw from Frege's own work. Most o f the other usual characterizations o f Analvtic Philosophy also seem to fail. M. k . M unitz. for example, characterizes Analytic Philosophy by reference to its supposed linguistic character. He mainains that the essence o f A nalytic Philosophy "consists in the careful attention paid to the use o f language as the medium o f communication o f thought, and to the various conditions and resources that language makes available for such com m unication" (M unitz 1981. p. 9). It is certainly true that Analytic philosophers have always been careful in the wavs Munitz describes: but. insofar as it is true o f all twentieth- century Analvtic philosophers, it is also true. e.g.. o f Aristotle in Posterior Analytics. Categories. Rhetoric, and more generally in his characteristic method o f identifying as many senses as possible o f a philosophically significant word, and o f paying close attention to ordinary usage (i.e. to what is saiif). o f Augustine in De Magistro. and o f many others who clearly fall outside the scope o f Analytic Philosophy as traditionally understood. Charlton's attempts at characterizing analytic philosophy (Charlton 1991) are guilty o f the same error. First. Charlton claims that vvhat unifies Analy tic Philosophy is that Analy tic philosophers ...go to conferences together, read and write for the same journals and examine each other's pupils. As a result, they have a consensus about vvhat is and vvhat is not a satisfactory treatment o f a topic. They also have some agreement (though it falls short o f perfect unanimity ) about vvhat topics are fit for philosophical treatment. (Charlton 1991. p.5) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20 Now. mere co-attendance at conferences and so-forth is not sufficient to account for the unity o f Analytic Philosophy, or any other philosophical school. One can easily imagine, and it is not too hard to find in historical and present reality, members o f different philosophical schools involved in the kind o f communal professional-life that Charlton describes. Instead it is. as he himself seems to maintain, the agreement on substantive issues that creates the unity. The two areas o f agreement Charlton mentions are: (1) agreement about what constitutes a satisfactory treatment o f a topic, and (2) agreement about what topics are fit for philosophical treatment. It is no accident that these supposed areas o f agreement have to do. respectively, w ith philosophical method and subject-matter. With regard to the former, it is noteworthy that he does not go on to discuss, nor does he so much as state, the supposed agreed-upon criteria for satisfactory philosophical treatment. The idea o f consensus on this point is left as vague as the idea o f Analytic Philosophv itself, thus the former does not help to define the latter. Concerning the second point. Charlton does have something to say. He suggests that analytic philosophers are united in their interest in the follow ing four categories: (1) things basic to logic and mathematics, e.g.. existence, truths and number: (2) things basic to physical science, e.g. time, change and causation: (3) good and evil, their varieties and the nature o f the difference between them: and (4) "mental processes, states and dispositions, especially the most general notions o f belief, desire, skill, purpose and self-awareness or consciousness." But then he goes on to say that "history reveals a single philosophical tradition" (Charlton 1991. p. II). which consists in an ongoing discussion o f these issues. This seems to make Analvtic Philosophv continuous with the whole history o f philosophy. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. However. Charlton also claims that "the ambition o f analytical philosophers is to gain insight into [these] topics ... by logical, conceptual and linguistic analysis" (Charlton 199|. p. 5). Perhaps this implies a methodological distinction between Analytic Philosophv and other schools. Usually, when one attempts to make a case for the unity o f Analytic Philosophy in terms o f method, they do so in terms o f the method o f analysis. A rthur Pap. for example, claimed that, though there were differences among Analytic philosophers.1 "the unanimous practice o f the analytic method as a powerful instrument o f criticism tends to blur these differences...” (Pap 1949. p. ix). Recent scholarship (cf. H ylton 1998). however, is at a loss to discover any form o f analysis practiced unanimousk by Analvtic philosophers— even by Analytic philosophers between 1900 and 1949. the year Pap made this claim. It is very d iffic u lt to define the analytic method in such a way that it captures all and only twentieth-century forms o f analysis. In its most general sense, "analy sis" refers to the "loosening up" o f complex wholes, the articulation o f them into their constituent elements. In this wide sense, countless philosophers from the pre-Socratics on down can be said to have employed an analytic method. However, in contemporary parlance, when a philosopher uses the term "analytic philosophy." he is not using "analytic" in this wide sense, as a mere descriptor. Instead, "analytic" functions like the words "Scholastic” or " Process" or "llle a tic " do when they occur before "Philosophy." and the whole term functions as a proper name. Used this way. "A nalytic Philosophy" refers to a school or 1 Pap identities four main factions within Analytic Philosophy : the followers o f Carnap (ideal language philosophers), the followers o f Moore (Ordinary Language philosophers). Wittgensteinians (characterized by Pap as "therapeutic positivists"), and. finally, an assortment o f "philosophers who are engaged in the clarification o f the foundations o f the sciences and. perhaps, o f know ledge in general by means o f detailed, patient analy ses, but who are "independent' to the extent that they refuse incorporation into any o f the mentioned factions" (Pap 1949, pp. ix f.). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. t> pc o f philosophy which is commonly understood to have originated in the early twentieth century, and to have persisted until the present day. For those who accept that there is a crisis in Analytic Philosophy, it is this movement in its present state that is in crisis: and. o f course, it is this movement which is the object o f all the current historical interest in Analvtic Philosophy. Prior to the advent ot this movement there was nothinu in philosophv to which the term "analytic" applied as part o f a proper name. Thus, if this type of philosophy is to be unified by its analytic method, it must be o f a type that originated or initially became popular in the early twentieth century. The practice o f mere analysis, analysis in the wide sense, clearly does not qualify. One might think, that there is some more specilic type o f analysis which applies to all and only those philosophers who worked in the twentieth century and who are considered to be Analytic. It turns out. however, that there is no such sense. T wentieth- century Analysts differed over such fundamental issues as the nature o f the complex wholes upon which analysis was to be performed, and the nature o f the elements into which these wholes were to be resolved through analysis. As a residt. if we narrow the relevant conception ot analysis sufficiently to exclude prc-tvventieth-century philosophers and in such a way as to include at least some twentieth-century Analysts, it w ill inevitably fail to apply to others. Thus, neither the use o f analy sis in general nor the use o f one or another specific ty pe o f analysis seems to be a necessary and sufficient condition for being an Analytic philosopher: and Charlton's third attempt at definition, like his first two. fails to shed any light on the nature o f Analytic Philosophy. Cohen contends that the unity o f analy tic philosophy is to be found in the fact that the problems analytic philosophers are interested in "are all. in one way or another. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. normative problems about reasons and reasoning....” (Cohen 1986 pp. 10 f.). But certainlv interest in normative problems about reasons and reasoning is not unique to those who were known as Analysts. Cohen him self admits that, on his definition. Analytic Philosophy turns out to be "a strand in the total history o f western philosophy from Socrates onwards rather than just a modern movement" (op. eit.. p. 49). Similarly. I'ollesdall (1997) characterizes analytic philosophy as philosophy with a strong commitment to argument and justification (as opposed to the kind o f philosophy done by. e.g.. Heidegger and Derrida, which relies mainly on rhetoric rather than clear argument). I'ollesdal frankly admits that his definition makes, e.g.. Aristotle. Descartes, and perhaps e\cn Thomas Aquinas count as Analy tic philosophers. The same problems haunt any attempt to use characteristic marks o f twentieth- century analytic philosophy as necessary and sufficient conditions. I have already discussed one o f these marks— the adoption o f analysis as a philosophical method. Other characteristic marks include anti-psychologism in logic, the \iew that either logic or the philosophy o f language— rather than metaphy sics or epistemology— is "firs t philosophy." or perhaps (what is closely associated with this) the view that philosophy is. from beginning to end. a linguistic enterprise. To show that these marks fail as necessary and sufficient conditions o f Analytic Philosophy, one need only demonstrate for each mark either that there is at least one philosopher who accepts it and who clearly is not a member o f the Analytic school, or that there is least one philosopher who does not accept it and who clearly is a member o f the Analytic school. Hacker (1998. pp. 4-14) successfully does this for most o f these marks, while other authors (M onk 1998. Hylton 1998) have done so for one or another o f them. It would be difficu lt to add anything substantive to what they Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24 have alread} said. Indeed, one could hope to do little more than pile up additional cases which demonstrate how the marks tail, which would be idle. However, in the interest o f being thorough. I w ill give a review o f the kinds o f things which lune been said in demonstrating that these marks fail to set the limits o f Analvtic Philosophv. Anti-psychologism in logic is certainly characteristic o f twentieth-century Analvtic Philosophy. Just as certainly, it was one o f the causes o f the emergence o f Analytic Philosophv. Nonetheless, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for being an Analvtic philosopher. Husserl was one o f the strongest opponents o f logical psychologism philosophv has ever known; but. far from being an Analvtic philosopher, he is widely regarded as the father o f Continental Philosophy. On the other hand. Ouine is usually thought to be an Analytic philosopher even though his theory o f logic is psychologistic (cf. Quine 1969. pp. 69-90; W illard 1989). I he view that either logic or the philosophy o f language is "first philosophy" fails as a necessary condition for being an Analytic philosopher, (i. L. Moore is widely regarded as a patriarch o f the Analytic movement. We shall see later that Moore's understanding o f philosophy places him squarely in that tradition which regards metaphy sics as "first philosophy." and that he clearly repudiated the view that philosophy is a wholly linguistic enterprise (cf. Moore 1942, pp. 660 ffi; Moore 1953). Likewise, even Dummett admits that Gareth Evans is an Analytic philosopher (albeit in the loose sense), even though he makes the philosophy o f thought prior to the philosophy o f language (Dummett 1993. p. 4 fi). It fails as a sufficient condition at least in the case o f the later Wittgenstein, who, as Hacker points out (1998. pp. 9. 12). held that no part o f philosophy Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was prior to any other part. Thus, it is not a necessary condition o f being an Analytic philosopher. The foregoing is adequate to illustrate the d ifficu lty involved in defining Analytic Philosophv O f course, it remains possible— though perhaps not plausible— that there is some feature or set o f features common to all and only Analytic philosophers which has thus far eluded the many fine researchers who have devoted their energies to the history o f Analvtic Philosophy. As it stands, there is 110 consensus among historians o f Analytic Philosophv as to vvhat its unifying features are. and there is certainlv no unitv to be found on the grounds o f methodology or subject matter. 1.4 C ’risis Present a n d C risis Past A llow ing that such a thing exists, the widely-perceived crisis in Analvtic Philosophv appears to be fundamentally a metaphilosophieal crisis, stemming from the fact that there is presently no adequate account o f Analytic Philosophv as a distinctive wav o f doing philosophv. capable o f holding together as members o f one unified philosophical group the mans disparate characters who count and have counted as Analvtic philosophers. Analvtic Philosophy is. m odifying a phrase from Husserl's critique o f extensionalist logic, a philosophy that does not understand itself—and one which those outside Analvtic Philosophy have a hard time understanding as well. Furthermore, there is a clear connection between the d ifficu lty in defining Analvtic Philosophv when viewed historically and the d ifficu lty in defining it when viewed systematically. The historical difficulty is not merely a matter o f "Analvtic Philosophy" hav ing been the name o f many philosophical systems with v iews on the subject-matter and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. methods o f philosophy so radically different that they resist unification within one overarching school. Certainly, this contributes to the difficulty: but a more fundamental cause emerges when we begin to consider why it has come to pass that these disparate systems are gathered together under a common name. To a great degree, the history o f Analytic Philosophy is the story o f the successive rejection, by later generations o f Analysts, o f earlier generations' views concerning the methods and subject matter o f philosophy It is a fact o f history that 1 1 0 specific formulation o f the subject matter or methods o f Analvtic Philosophy has survived for much more than two decades. I'nder every specific formulation o f the Analvtic approach to philosophv. Analvtic Philosophv has lacked the kind o f enduring plausibility that other great philosophical systems like Platonism. Aristotelianism. Thomism. or Kantianism (at least in its ethical aspects) have enjoyed. Thus, the historical d ifficultly reveals that the systematic difficulty has plagued Analvtic Philosophv for most o f its history, in that Analvtic Philosophv has never been able to advance an adequate view o f its subject-matter and methods. Tarlier (tj 1.1)1 suggested that the idea that Analvtic Philosophv is in a state o f crisis is interesting for a number o f reasons. What has just been said about the relation between the historical and systematic difficulties in defining Analvtic Philosophv suggests further points o f interest. I f there is indeed a crisis, and if it consists mainly or even partly in Analvtic Philosophy's inability to adequately specify its subject-matter and methods, and if there is no point in its history at which Analy tic Philosophy has successfully done so. it seems to follow that Analy tic Philosophy has always been in this state o f crisis. In what follows. I w ill attempt to demonstrate the plausibility o f this view. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2. Analytic Philosophy: Conceptions and Misconceptions 2. / ,1 Crisis Within the Crisis In $ 1.3 I drew attention to the recent proliferation o f work on the historv and nature o f Analvtic Philosophv. and I maintained that this is best understood against the backdrop o f the crisis in Analv tic Philosophv and the call for reformation that has gone out trom Putnam. Ilin tikka . and others. These developments are hopeful insofar as tliev indicate that a season o f fully conscious, self-directed change— as opposed to the passive, unconscious "historical d rift" to which all theory-driven institutions are susceptible— mav be on the horizon for Analytic Philosophy. However, it remains to be seen whether that change, if it indeed materializes, w ill count as progress, regress, or— perhaps even worse than regress— an apparent change only, masking a deeper stagnation. It seems to me that things are presently headed in the direction o f this third possibility. Again in § 1.1. I argued that a successful reformation would depend on an accurate assessment o f the nature o f Analvtic Philosophy. It seems to me. however, that the task o f discerning the nature o f Analvtic Philosophv has been and continues to be stymied by some tenacious misconceptions which disguise Analvtic Philosophy's true nature and the true causes o f its crisis. If this is so. the seriousness o f the present situation in Analvtic Philosophv is intensified. Its situation is like that o f a patient suffering from a possibly fatal condition, who has been misdiagnosed. Only by chance w ill the treatment prescribed cure the real ill. More than likely, it w ill affect it not at all: the disease w ill remain and continue on its course. Thus there is a crisis within the crisis facing Analytic Philosophv. In this chapter. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 28 I w ill attempt to reveal the misconceptions mentioned above, and thus to arrive at a view ot' Analytic Philosophv not tainted by them. 2.2 The Popular Conception o f Analytic Philosophy Given the d iffic u lty in defining Analvtic Philosophy, a contemporary Meno might cast doubt 011 the possibility o f conducting fruitful research into the history and nature o f Analvtic Philosophy. If we cannot define it. do we really know what Analvtic Philosophv is? And if we don't know vvhat Analvtic Philosophv is. how w ill we look for it? How are we to know whether any o f the objects we meet in the course o f our research are Analytic Philosophv or part o f Analv tic Philosophy? How w ill we know if any o f the insights and observ ations we arriv e at apply to Analytic Philosophv? Menu's paradox, o f course, is generated by using "know ," "knowledge" and related words equivocally. In one sense, we all know perfectly well what Analytic Philosophy is. just as Socrates knew what virtue is. In another sense, we don’t. We know what Analytic Philosophy is at one level or to a certain degree: we want to come to know it on a deeper level or more fully. The distinction between these two ways o f knowing leads to. among other things, the paradox o f analy sis, upon which I have nothing enlightening to say at present. I take it for granted, however, that there is such a distinction to be made, and that the way to begin research is by setting down what one does know about the subject. This prov ides an initial orientation toward the subject, and delimits the Held o f inquiry at least negatively, by ruling out things that are certainly not part o f the subject matter. In this section. I w ill try to set down some things that are generally taken to be "know n" about Analytic Philosophy. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 29 It was once widely accepted among Analvtic philosophers that one way— possibly the best or only way— to get at the concept o f a thing is to examine how the term that stands for or is associated with it is used. Hacker has correctly observed that "the term 'analytic philosophy' is a fairly new one." Concerning it. he says: There is no point in try ing to follow W ittgenstein’s advice...: "don't think, but look!” (1958: 66). i.e. examine how the expression in question is in tact used. For the term does not have a well-established use that commands general consensus. Here we are free to mold the concept as we please; indeed, arguablv not free, but required to do so. (Hacker 1998. p. 14) I disagree. It does not follow from the fact that the term does not have a well-established use that commands general consensus that we may mold the concept as we please. It simply reveals that, as it is generally used, "analy tic philosophy" is a vague term. As such, it is in need ot precising definition: and in giving a precising definition we are. far from being free to mold the vague concept as we please, constrained by the clear facts concerning the use ot the vague term. What are the clear facts concerning the use of "analytic philosophy"? Perhaps the first thing to note is that there are senses o f "analytic philosophy " which are not vague, and do not stand in need o f precising definition. In what may well be the broadest sense o f the term, "analytic philosophy" can be used as a descriptive phrase to pick out any brand o f philosophy that analyzes wholes o f some sort into constituents of some sort. I'll call this analytic p h ilo s o p h y It is in this sense that Shadworth Hodgson, in the first volume o f M ind, discusses analytic as opposed to synthetic and constructive philosophy (Hodgson I876a-c). and it is in this sense that Herbert Spencer used the term. However, as I have noted (§ 1.3), this is not the sense in which "analytic philosophy" is Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 0 iistialK used today. It is rare in contemporary parlance to see "analytic philosophy" used as a mere descriptor, as it is in "analytic philosophy,." Instead, it is used as a proper name— the name o f a type or school o f philosophy.5 Thus Charlton, for example, describes the subject o f his book as "the variety o f philosophy favored by the majority o f philosophers working in the English-speaking countries" (Charlton 1991. p. 2). Used this way. the antithesis o f analy tic philosophy is not synthetic or constructive philosophy but Continental Philosophy: and in fact, one way o f characterizing contemporary Analytic Philosophy is by contrasting it with Continental Philosophy. The different names are meant to designate different schools o f philosophy, disparate ways o f doing philosophy. Thus Charlton goes on to present analytic philosophy in contrast with Continental Philosophy. It is d ifficu lt to find a really suitable classification for what Analvtic Philosophy is. The term "school" has recently waned in popularity, and terms like "movem ent." "tradition." "sty le." etc.. now seem to be preferred. Not wanting to become embroiled in logomachy, let me explain that I take the really important difference between "school" and these new ly favored terms to be that the latter connote (in the literary rather than the logical sense) a looser sort o f association, and hence a more general— and often more subtle— ground o f unity, than does "school." One can get a sense o f the sort o f distinction I have in mind if one thinks about the ground o f unity among the various groups which are part o f the so- called Judeo-Christian tradition as opposed to the ground o f unity o f a specific one o f those groups— Roman Catholics, say. In any case, whatever we might prefer to call it. it is indisputable that "Analytic Philosophy" is used to pick out a kind o f philosophy , and to distinguish that kind o f philosophy from other kinds. W hatever kinds may be. they are things that can be distinguished between on the basis o f their features. Likewise, both determining what kind o f thing a thing is and determining whether tw o things are o f the same kind are done on the basis o f their features. Indeed, being o f a kind seems to be a matter o f having certain features. Hence, what is really important when dealing with Analytic Philosophy is the set o f features which characterize Analytic Philosophy as a kind, in virtue o f possession o f which a philosophical system, a bit o f philosophizing, a philosopher, etc.. are unified as members o f the same kind and thus belong together in a way that they do not belong with other things. It is. I think, an important question whether these features provide the kind o f unity required to justify calling Analy tic Philosophy a school: however, this is not the question I am primarily interested in at present. Since I have to use some word, I w ill use the word "school," but I mean nothing more by this than that Analy tic Philosophy is a kind o f philosophy . Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 31 saying that the two diffe r mainly “ in how they conceive the subject and think it should be conducted" (op. eit.. pp 2 f.). So. there is a sense in which "analytic philosophy" refers to a school o f philosophy, a distinctive way o f doing philosophy, the way favored by most philosophers in English-speaking countries. I ’ ll call analytic philosophy in this sense analytic philosophy:, or. since it serves as a proper name. Analytic Philosophv. What. then, are the clear facts concernmg the use o f "Analytic Philosophy” ? first. "Analytic Philosophv" is ordinarily used to refer to a contemporary school o f philosophv. one which now exists. The fact that it is used to distinguish the way m which most contemporary philosophers in English-speaking countries are now doing philosophy trom the way in which contemporary Continental philosophers are now doing philosophy is sufficient to demonstrate this. But recall also Charlton's attempt to explain the unity o f Analy tic Philosophy in terms o f shared social activ ities and structures. He was not there talking about some bygone form o f social life, but about the present social life o f Analy tic philosophers. Second. "A nalytic Philosophy" is ordinarily used to refer to a school which originated around the turn o f the twentieth century . W ith the possible exception o f Frege, there is no pre-twentieth-century philosopher who is ordinarily thought o f as belonging to the school o f Analytic Philosophy . I suspect that most contemporary philosophers w ill be able to verify this for themselves by considering whether they can think of. say. Aristotle. Descartes. Hume, or any other pre-twentieth-century philosopher (again, with the possible exception o f Frege) as an analytic philosopher in precisely the same sense that they normally think of. say. Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, or Kripke as an Analytic philosopher. The fact that Analytic philosophers tend to conceive o f their school as a twentieth-century Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. movement lias been noted by others working on the history and nature o f Analvtic Philosophy . Hacker notes that that there is "a broad consensus, but not uniform agreement, on who are to be deemed analytic philosophers" (Hacker 1998. p. 4). Michael Corrado has pointed out that though Analytic philosophers are generally unable to identify their school positively. nevertheless, when analysis is opposed to other important contemporary traditions— phenomenology, for example— philosophers know prettv well who is to count as an analyst and who is not. The term analyst applies, in this very loose sense, to the majority o f the important philosophers in the English-speaking countries, and in Scandinavia. They are philosophers who have been influenced by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Logical Positivists, especially Rudolph Carnap, and American pragmatists, especially C. I. Lewis, or else they have been influenced by men who were influenced by those philosophers. (Corrado 1975. p. x ii) Corrado's ''first generation" o f Analytic influence consists entirely o f twentieth-century figures. Eollesdal begins his 1997 essay by citing the ''customary" division between Analytic and Continental Philosophy, and. within Analytic Philosophy, between "tw o principal traditions: one inspired by logic, o f which Bolzano. Frege, and Russell are the early main protagonists, and one oriented toward ordinary language, in which G.E. Moore, the later Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin played a central part" (Follesdal 1997. p. I), l ollesdaEs inclusion o f Bolzano is unusual: and. apart from this, his "custom ary" v iew o f Analytic Philosophy is very near the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy as I have characterized it. In recent years, Brian Leiter's The Philosophical Gourmet Report has become a highly regarded resource among Analy tic philosophers. Though it is not a scholarly work, it is useful as an index o f contemporary Analytic culture. The primary function o f the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Report is to provide rankings for Analytic departments, hence it serves as something o f an axiological meter insofar as it reveals (exiensionally) what counts as good work among Analytic philosophers. But also, the Report also contains expressions o f Leiter's own views on the nature ol Analytic Philosophy. Insofar as Leiter has his linger on the pulse o f contemporary Analytic culture (which is strongly suggested by the widespread acceptance with which the Report has been met), his view may be taken as indicative o f the contemporary Analytic mind. Concerning the origin o f Analytic Philosophy, he says: "The foundational figures o f this tradition are philosophers like Gottlob Frege. Bertrand Russell, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore: other canonical figures include Carnap. CHiine. Davidson, kripke. Rawls. Dummett. and Strawson" (Leiter 2000). Clearly, this supports the view that Analytic philosophers conceive o f their school as having originated around the turn o f the twentieth centurv. More examples could be cited, but this should be sufficient to show that, very otten. what people are talking about, or vvhat they have in mind, when they use the term "analytic philosophy" is a school o f philosophy which now exists, and which originated in the early twentieth century. This is what I have called the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy, and its content, however m inim al, must not be disregarded as we investigate the history and nature o f Analytic Philosophy . 2.3 The Contemporary Interest in Analvtic Philosophy The content o f the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy must not be disregarded, because all o f the things which make the investigation o f something called "analytic philosophy" worthy o f large amounts o f intellectual effort and other resources— Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. viz.. the "crisis" and the call for reformation, and the surge o f historical interest that has arisen alongside these— have to do with analvtic philosophv in that sense. Very likely e\er\ book is o f interest to its author, and ever} subject o f study is thought to be worthwhile by the one who chooses to study it. However, the lim ited sphere o f interest generated by one or even a small number o f academics is not sufficient to explain the recent proliferation o f work on Anal} tic Philosophy. Large numbers o f book contracts and successful journal submissions on one topic o ra number o f closelv related topics generallv depend in part on there being a relativel} large sphere o f interest in that subject— that is. there must be an "audience." The recent appearance o f an increasing number o f books and articles on Analvtic Philosophv is explicable only in light o f the fact that there is presentlv an increasingly widespread interest among academics in Analvtic Philosophv. historicall} and systematically considered. As we have seen, this interest is not merelv "academic" but has a certain pragmatic justification insofar as an adequate grasp o f its nature is essential for guiding an} attempt at reforming A nalytic Philosophy. Given that this is the situation that makes the large-scale publication o f work on Analytic Philosophv possible, it is reasonable to insist that contemporary work on Analvtic Philosophy exists to meet an interest, and in fact a need, that goes be}ond the isolated interest o f the author and his small circle o f like-minded associates. It seems to me that contemporary scholars should be m indful o f this context o f interest as they pursue research on the history and nature of Analytic Philosophy. And indeed, most contemporary scholars are mindful o f it. at least insofar as the initial orientation o f their work is concerned. That is to say. when an author initially identifies the subject o f his research, the defmiendum o f vvhat w ill be his attempt to define Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. analytic philosophy, it is usually portrayed as a school o f philosophy which exists now. and which originated in the early twentieth century. Corrado. for example, begins his historical researches with the Russell o f Principia Mathematica. and with the school o f Logical Atomism. He counts Russell as one o f the founders o f what he calls "this type [i.e.. the Analvtic tvpej o f philosophv" (Corrado 1975. p. 3). Thus it appears that Corrado conceives ot Analvtic Philosophy as a school o f philosophy founded in the early twentieth century. Dummett begins w ith Frege, but he acknowledges that twentieth-century figures like Moore and Russell had a role in the genesis o f Analytic Philosophv . and he suggests that Frege s role is more that o f a conceptual progenitor than the founder o f the Analvtic school (Dummett 1993. pp. viii-ix ). Thus he likewise seems to conceive o f Analytic Philosophv as a school (with very definite doctrinal boundaries), which originated around the turn o f the twentieth centurv . Even authors more savvy to the seemingly insurmountable difficulties in defining Analytic Philosophy have nonetheless recognized that the present interest in Analytic Philosophv is governed by the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy: that is. they have recognized that it is an interest in Analytic Philosophy conceived o f as a school o f philosophy originating in the twentieth century. Nowhere is recognition o f the limits o f the current interest more apparent than in the work o f P. M. S. Flacker. In a 1997 essay, after noting the difficulty o f finding unifying tenets among twentieth-century Analytic philosophers. Flacker advocates using "analytic philosophy" in its widest sense, to refer to vvhat I have called analytic philosophy!. However, when he moves from defining the movement to giving an exposition o f its history, he limits his topic to vvhat he calls "twentieth-century analytic philosophy" or "modern analytic philosophy"; and this, he Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 36 says. begins vvith Russell and Moore around the turn o f the century This arbitrarily imposed historical lim it reflects the lim it o f historical interest. In a later essay (Hacker 1998). Hacker seems to recant his position on using the wide sense o f "analytic philosophy." There, after dismissing traditional wavs o f characterizing A nalytic Philosophy, he maintains that Analytic Philosophy is best regarded as a dynamic historical movement, divisible into various phases, each o f which partly overlaps the one before it. Hacker uses the analogy o f a tapestry to illustrate his view: most (but not all) o f the threads out o f which the tapestry o f analytic philosophy was woven can be traced back to the more or less remote past. What is most distinctive about the tapestry are the ways in which the various threads are interwoven and the character o f the designs. These altered over time, some threads being either abandoned and replaced by new ones or differently used, and others becoming more prominent in the weave than hitherto, some patterns dominating one period, but sinking into the background or disappearing altogether in later periods. (Hacker 1998. pp. 14 f.) Taken one way. this characterization fails to distinguish Analytic Philosophy from philosophy at large. A fter all. the whole history o f philosophy involves the dvnamic interaction o f ideas across generations o f philosophers, and thus can be regarded as a dynamic historical movement. Clearly, the figure o f the tapestry fits the whole history o f philosophy, or any other period out o f the whole history o f philosophy, as well as it does the history o f Analytic Philosophy . The question which needs to be answered is: how are we to pick out just that section o f the tapestry o f the whole history o f philosophy which is Analy tic Philosophy? Here, one might turn to Hacker's mention o f "the ways in w hich the various threads are interwoven and the character o f the designs." taking these figures to refer to intrinsic features o f Analytic Philosophy which serve to unify its various phases Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and to distinguish the unified whole from other parts o f the tapestry o f philosophv-as-a- whole. But then, it is difficult to see what these figures could refer to besides various theoretical positions adopted by Analytic philosophers, the likes o f which have served as part o f the definien.s o f many a failed attempt at defining Analvtic Philosophv in terms o f characteristic marks. That there are any such defining marks Hacker flatly denies, thus I do not think that this is how he intends his characterization to be taken. When Hacker speaks o f Analvtic Philosophy as a dvnamic historical movement. I believe he means to characterize it not merely as a dvnamic movement that took place, as all movements do. in or across history, but as a dynamic movement that took place over a .specific period in history. Later in the same essay, after insisting contra our initial interpretation o f the tapestry metaphor that "there are no defining features that characterize the Analvtic movement in all its phases." Hacker asserts that it is "most illum inating and least misleading to employ the term 'analytic philosophv' as the name o f [the) interm ingling strain o f ideas distinctive o f our centurv [i.e.. the twentieth centurv J" (Hacker 1998. p. 24). No longer does he advocate using the term "analytic philosophv" to refer to analvtic philosophy;. Instead, he wants its referent to be a specifically twentieth-century phenomenon. Thus, when Hacker claims that "the unity o f Analvtic philosophv in the twentieth century is historical" (Hacker 1998. p. 24). what he seems to mean is that all phases o f twentieth-century analvtic philosophv have in common onlv that thev occurred w ithin the twentieth centurv. His view seems to be that we are to pick out Analvtic Philosophv's section from the tapestry o f the whole history o f philosophv by superimposing a tim eline on the tapestry and focusing only on that portion which falls w ithin the twentieth centurv. We are then to ask ourselves what the most distinctive Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. features o f this portion o f the tapestry are. as compared to any other portion: and then, certainly, things like the use o f formal logic, the emphasis on language or linguistic analysis as having a primary place in philosophy, etc., w ill stand out. They w ill stand out as distinctive, but they w ill not o f themselves unify the movement. This most recent position o f Hacker's is. perhaps more than anything else, illustratec o f the fact that the contemporary historical interest is an interest in Analvtic Philosophy understood as a twentieth-century phenomenon, for it is a huge concession to that interest. Hacker is one o f a growing number o f scholars whose thought about Analvtic Philosophv is not constrained by the popular concept. He has been, as it were, liberated from its boundaries through historical research. Por him. Analvtic Philosophv is not merely a twentieth-century movement: thus, from his point o f view, the interest in Analytic Philosophv as a twentieth-century phenomenon must be seen as arbitrarv. since, apart from that interest there seems to be no good reason to impose what would be. from his point o f view, arbitrary temporal limits on a set o f ideas and methods whose origins often are located far prior to the twentieth centurv. For most people, however, the limits o f the current historical interest in Analvtic Philosophv do not appear to be arbitrarv. When we are interested in Analvtic Philosophv. we do not choose to be interested in a twentieth- century phenomenon; the historical lim it is dictated by the popular conception o f Analvtic Philosophv. Having acquired its present content, or its present meaning if we're talking about the term "A nalvtic Philosophy.'" through an unreflective historical process, we. hav ing inherited the concept as we do our language, do not choose to regard Analvtic Philosophy as hav ing this or that feature. It is given to us as a school o f philosophv which exists now and which originated in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, in the socio- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. linguistic context where "A nalytic Philosophy" has this meaning. we cannot without elaborate explanation use the term to refer to anvthing other than a school o f philosophy which originated around the turn o f the twentieth century and expect to be understood. 2.4 The Contemporary Tretul in Defining Analytic Philosophy I just mentioned that a grow ing number o f scholars are beginning to go bevond the popular conception in their understanding o f Analvtic Philosophv. What is the justification for this? As we saw in $ 1.3. much o f the most recent scholarship on the historv and nature ot Analytic Philosophy has busied itself w ith debunking traditional misconceptions about the theoretical unity o f Analvtic philosophers. By far the most important discovery to come out ot contemporary research on Analvtic Philosophv is that traditional definitions o f Analvtic Philosophy are inadequate: and. indeed contemporarv work has revealed that there is nothing unique to twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophv capable o f accounting for the unity o f Analvtic Philosophv considered as a , ' ri , ' cal school. Groups can derive their unity from many sources: for example, the members o f a group may be united politically, geographically, ideologically, or teleologicallv— in terms o f a common goal. Earlier (§ 1.3) we saw Charlton propose that Analvtic philosophers are unified b> their common socio-academic activities. This might account for a kind o f sociological unity, bin philosophical unitv must be accounted for in terms o f agreement on theoretical issues. If we are to regard Analvtic Philosophv as a philosophical school, we must be able to point to the theoretical positions upon which Analvtic philosophers agree, and which serve as tenets o f Analytic Philosophv. Thus, the findings o f contemporarv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9385 40 scholars, which im ply that there are no such tenets, pose a real problem for Analytic Philosophy. I hey also pose a problem for those doing work on the history and nature o f Analytic Philosophy. Contemporary scholars quite rightly begin their work with the popular concept o f Analytic Philosophy : thus they begin with the assumptions that ( I ) Analy tic Philosophy is a philosophical school (or at least some sort o f theoretically unitied philosophical group) and that (2) Analytic Philosophy originated in the early twentieth century. However, their research has led them to the observation that (3) there is no point ol theoretical unity among all and only those twentieth-century figures popularly taken to be Analytic philosophers. Obviously, these propositions form an inconsistent triad, and one ot them must be rejected as talse. Given that (3) is thoroughly grounded in historical research, we cannot reject it. Thus, we are faced with a dilemma: we must do away with one ol the two "parts'" o f the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy. As we saw in > } 1.3. some contemporary scholars have proposed new definitions which characterize Analytic Philosophy in ways that locate its origin far prior to the twentieth century . In fact, this seems to be the overwhelming trend among recent attempts to define Analytic Philosophy. It seems then, that the contemporary scholars have decided to keep ( I) and reject (2). In a certain respect, this contemporary trend in defining Analytic Philosophy is sim ilar to an earlier trend. In the heyday o f Linguistic-Analytic Philosophy, a number o f Analytic philosophers made efforts to represent Analytic Philosophy as continuous with the whole history o f philosophy by assimilating the history o f philosophy to their movement. Gilbert Ryle, for one. claimed that “ philosophical arguments have always Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 41 larjzcK. it'not entirely, consisted in attempts to thrash out ’what it means to say so and so"' (Ryle. 1971). Arthur Pap. one o f the first to attempt to analyze Analytic Philosophy as a unified movement or school, believed that A history o f analytic philosophy, if it should ever be written, would not have to begin w ith the twentieth century . It could go all the way back to Socrates, since the Socratic 'dialectic' is nothing else but a method o f clarifying meanings, applied primarily to moral terms. Again, much o f Aristotle's w ritin g consists o f logical analysis.... It is especially the so- called British empiricists. Locke. Hume. Berkeley and their descendants, who practiced philosophy primarily as an analytic method. To be sure, much o f what they wrote belongs to psychology, but if that is deducted there still remains a conscientious preoccupation with questions o f meaning, full o f lasting contributions to analytic philosophy.... (Pap 1949. \ ii- v iii) Still, there is a difference between this earlier trend and the contemporary one. It consists in the fact that, whereas the former made its case for continuity by assimilating the history o f philosophy to A nalytic Philosophy, the latter does so by assimilating Analytic Philosophy to the history o f philosophy— i.e.. it is no longer our philosophical ancestors who are construed as being concerned, as Analytic philosophers once were, with logico- linguistic issues: instead, it is Analytic philosophers who are construed as being concerned, as were certain figures in the history o f philosophy, with normative problems about reasons and reasoning, argument and justification, causation, good and evil, mental states, etc. The earlier trend mainly died out along with the linguistic philosophy whose proponents provided its motive force." The contemporary trend, however, seems to be This is not to say it is completely dead, however. Louis Pojman has recently claimed: for a simplistic but meaningful distinction [between Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy], we might say that Analytic Philosophy is centered on language and logic, analyzing the meanings o f words and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 42 thriving. Sadl>. it seems to me that the contemporary trend is just as misguided as the earlier one. Whereas the earlier trend relied upon the anachronistic portrayal o f pre- twentieth-century figures as linguistic philosophers, the contemporary trend redefines Analytic Philosophy in a way that is just as faithless to the facts o f history. first, there sim ply was no school o f Analytic Philosophy prior to the twentieth centurv— i.e.. prior to the early twentieth century, there was nothing in philosophy to which the term "a n a lytic" applied as part o f a proper name. It is d ifficu lt to determine exactly when this use o f "analytic philosophy” entered the philosophical lexicon, but it is clear that it did not happen before the twentieth century. This does not immediately disqualify pre-twentieth-century philosophers from being counted as Analysts. W yclifa n d I lus are considered reformers though they died long before the occurrence o f any event that could be called a “ reform ation." and long before there was some established group that could be called "reform ed" or "protestant." However, this is justified in that the later reformers can be seen as carrying on. and in fact accomplishing, the very project which the earls reformers started. Despite important differences in the details. W yclifand Hus had at least some very general substantive views and goals in common with later reformers— Luther and Calvin, say; and the fact that these goals were achieved only in the latter does not diminish the fact that the former fought for them also. But there is just no analogous situation with pre-twentieth-century philosophers and twentieth-century Analysts. W hile there are certainly instances o f twentieth and post-twentieth-century Analy sts having some sentences even as it analyzes arguments and builds comparatively modest epistemological and metaphysical theories. This tradition finds its originator in Socrates who sought the definition o f a word as revealing its meaning as a prerequisite to solving the philosophical problem in question.... (Pojnian 2001. p. I) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 43 o f the same goals as pre-twentieth-century philosophers. 1 am not aware o f am twentieth- century developments or accomplishments which would warrant including the latter as members o f the Analytic school. Russell, for example, can be seen as sharing with Liebniz and Frege the goal o f developing an ideal language. This goal accounts in part for the emergence o f Logical Atomism, which is often taken to be the first stage o f Analvtic philosopln. Although he has this goal in common with Russell, no one ever thinks to claim that Liebniz and Frege were Logical Atomists. By the same token, they should not be counted Analytic philosophers. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that, when ’'Analvtic Philosophy" did enter the lexicon, it was not prim arily as a name fo r any pre-twentieth-century phenomenon. The use o f "analytic philosophy" as a proper name emerged to meet a need— viz. the need to discuss a certain sort o f philosophical fervor which had been stimulated most directlv bv the work o f Moore and Russell, and o f w hich they too. perhaps, were part. D.S. Clarke has claimed that "the term 'analytic philosophy" seems to have been introduced in the late It?4()s as a label standing for the radically new approach to philosophy then dominating discussion in Great Britain and the United States" (Clarke 1997. p.I). Clarke is right about the designation o f the term, but wrong about the date o f its introduction. Perhaps it is true that it did not become part o f the working vernacular o f philosophers until the late 1940s: however, while no one has been able to say when and by whom "analytic philosophy" was first used in the sense relevant to discussions o f Analy tic Philosophy , it is clear that it was used in approximately that sense well before the late 1940s. In 1936 we see Ernest Nagel using "A nalytic Philosophy" to designate a set o f "tendencies still in the process o f development" (Nagel 1936a, p. 5). Among these tendencies Nagel includes a tendency Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 44 toward impatience with "philosophic systems built in the traditionally grand manner.'' toward treating traditional philosophical problems as pseudo-problems generated by the misuse ot language, a tendency to be uninterested in the history o f philosophy and. instead, to have a very focused interest in questions o f logic and method, and a tendency to conceive o f philosophy's task as the clarification o f meanings via an analytic method. Am ong the leading figures whose work embodied these tendencies Nagel includes Moore. Wittgenstein, the members o f the Vienna Circle, and a group o f Polish philosophers the o n l\ one o f which widely known in contemporary Anahtic circles is Tarski. Russell is present as an instrumental background figure. It is noteworthy that a ll o f the tendencies Nagel meant to pick out by using "analytic philosophy" are to this day associated with AnaKtic Philosoplw on the popular conception. This is not to sa\ that Analytic Philosophy continues to embod\ all o f these tendencies (though it certainly continues to embody some), but only that the characteristics toward which Analytic philosophers tended in 1936 are popularly accepted as indeed Inning been characteristics o f Analytic Philosophy at some point in its history. It is also noteworthy both that Nagel includes no pre-twentieth-cenlury figures in his discussion o f the relevant tendencies and that most o f the figures he includes in his discussion are to this day popularly taken to be some o f the central figures in the founding and, or development o f A n a l\tic Philosophy. Thus there is a high degree o f similarity, suggesting an historical continuity. between Nagel's conception o f Analytic Philosophy in 1936 and the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy in contemporary philosophical culture. However, there is also an important respect in which Nagel's conception differs from the popular conception. Though he uses "Analytic Philosophy” to pick out Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. something far more restricted than analytic philosophyi. and thus is clearly not using the term in that sense. Nagel does not take the referent o f his discussion to be a school o f philosophy in any strong sense o f "school," with the fairly rigorous ground o f unity and the more-or-less deliberate cohesion such a sense might im ply. He is careful to note the significant differences among the figures he reports on. Most importantly, he is careful to note the uncertain status o f these tendencies considered as constituting an adequate approach to philosophy. "Those who take a leading part in determining the direction o f these tendencies." he reported, "still maintain suspended judgments on central issues" (Nagel 1936. p. 5). Though Nagel does not give a concise list o f those central issues, the ensuing discussion suggests that they might include such things as. for Wittgenstein, the full explication o f his theory o f meaning as use. and. for the Logical Positivists, the proper formulation o f the verification principle o f meaning. Though Nagel was sympathetic with these tendencies, and seems to have believed that they were tendencies in the right direction, he was discerning enough to see that there was more work to be done before they would constitute anything like a complete approach to philosophy. We shall return to this theme later. Here, the main point is that Nagel did not conceive o f Analytic Philosophy as a school the way later Analy tic philosophers did. and as some still do. Can we. in the face o f this difference, conceive of Nagel's Analytic Philosophy and ours as one and the same thing? What is at issue here is the propriety o f exercising what Putnam has called charity in interpretation (Putnam 1988. pp. 12 ff.). By "charity." he means, roughly, choosing to regard all occurrences o f the same term as at some level synony mous. The choice to be charitable in interpretation comes into play in situations where people use the same term with differing conceptions of what that term Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 46 refers to. Arguably, differing conceptions o f the referent could require different referents, in which ease those who use the term could not be understood to be talking about same thing. However, there are cases where it seems reasonable to regard these differing conceptions as different conceptions o f the same thing. Putnam gives the case o f the word "electron": in 1900 it was believed that electrons move in trajectories around the nucleus, but In 1934 it was believed that electrons have no trajectory. Here we have a choice whether to regard scientists in 1900 and scientists in 1934 (or even the same scientist, e.g.. Holir. in 1900 and in 1934) as talking about the same thing or different things when they used "electron." O f course it is generally accepted without question that the difference between "electron" in 1900 and "electron" in 1934 is not a difference in reference, but a difference in beliefs about or conceptions o f the same referent. On the other hand, there are cases where charity is not warranted. For example. Putnam considers the possibility that phlogiston really does exist, that what some scientists once called "phlogiston" is what contemporary scientists call "valence electrons." However, as Putnam points out. "we are not prepared to say. 'Phlogiston theorists were talking about valence electrons, but they had some o f the properties wrong'" (Putnam 1988. p. 14). To do so. he says, would require excessive charity. It is d ifficu lt to specify the conditions under which charitv is warranted and those under which it is not. Nonetheless, we seem to be able to recognize warrant or lack thereof in particular cases. Putnam includes this ability among those seemingly intuitional powers which constitute Fodor's "general intelligence." Leaving this difficulty aside, and reiving on "general intelligence," I want to propose that we can legitimately take our Analytic Philosophy and Nagel's to be one and the same thing. The difference between his Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 47 conception and the contemporary popular conception is easily accounted for by the fact that, in the years after Nagel wrote his piece, what he identified as a set o f tendencies solidified— in the popular mind, at least— into "the radically new approach to philosophy" (m y emphasis) mentioned by Clarke, so that by 1949 we see Arthur Pap using "analytic philosophy to refer to a "school o f thought" (Pap 1949. p. ix) unified in its use o f a radically new method— the method o f linguistic analysis. I f we may assume that Nagel's tendencies became our school, and that his Analytic Philosophy is more or less the same creature as ours, we can insist the term "A nalytic Philosophy" must be understood as designating something that originated in the twentieth century. Additional justification for this view is provided by the fact that one cannot explain why contemporary Analytic Philosophy is called "analytic" unless we accept that there is a certain continuity between it and the aforementioned fervor over the work o f Moore and Russell. It the contemporary way o f doing philosophy favored in English speaking countries and which stands opposed to Continental Philosopln did not already have a name, words such as "rational" or "lo g ica l" would be better than "analvtic." as Cohen's and Follesdal's definitions suggest. But it does have a name— a name grounded in the methodological predilections and the terminology o f these two great twentieth-century figures, and passed down to those who. throughout the twentieth and now into the 2 1'1 century, hav e continued to work w ithin Nagel's set o f tendencies. Pap, as we have seen, insisted that philosophers from Socrates on down should be included as members o f the Analvtic school. However, this was a mix concept ion o f Analvtic Philosophy based on a radically misguided, linguistic interpretation o f pre- twentieth century figures. Thus Pap’s conception o f "Analytic Philosophy." insofar as it includes pre-twentieth century figures, is best understood as an illegitimate expansion o f the concept o f Analytic Philosophy. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 48 krip ke lias made fam iliar the figure o f baptism as an illustration o f the context in which and mechanism by which a name takes on meaning. In the case o f the term "Analv tic Philosophy." what was baptized was a set o f tendencies among earl) twentieth- centurv figures which were thought to be not merely original and innovative, but capable o f revolutionizing philosophy. What we are mainly interested in today when we are interested in Analvtic Philosophy is the development and ultimate fate o f these tendencies. Alreadv. at the stage o f baptism, and indeed prov iding part o f the necessarv motiv ation to want to pick out a set o f philosophical tendencies with a name, a certain level o f unit) was perceived among them— the unity requisite to get philosophy going in the one right direction. Once baptized, it came to be widely believed that these tendencies had achieved the unitv proper to a philosophical school— and certainly in some manifestations the) had. However, if it has turned out that these tendencies amounted to much less than was originall) hoped for them, if those central issues to which Nagel refers were never adequately resolved, and i f it has turned out that the tendencies themselves are not sufficient for prov iding the unity o f a philosophical school, it is the duty o f historians o f philosopln to report this. Though contemporary research on the history o f Analvtic Philosopln has called into question many common assumptions about the ground o f unitv in Analvtic Philosophy, it has not called into question the assumption that there is some ground o f unity. Assuming that there must be some ground o f unity, contemporary researchers are w illin g to sacrifice the idea that Analvtic Philosophy originated in the twentieth century to preserve the idea that there is some sort o f philosophical!) unified group w orth) o f picking out with a name— the name Analvtic Philosophy. However, to do so is to detach the term Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 49 from the context in which it acquired the meaning that is now crucial for understanding the history. development, collapse, and crisis o f Analvtic Philosophy. Thus, though the authors who have contributed to the contemporary trend have done much to dispel traditional misconceptions about the unity o f Analytic Philosophy , they end up merely replacing one misconception with another. The following story illustrates how this happens. It used to be believed that witches caused various sorts o f mischief, including disease. When plague struck, one might have gone on a witch-hunt in an attempt to extinguish the plague at its source. Witches, o f course, don't exist (or if they do. they are not what they are popularly thought to be); thus no one has ever had the opportunity to acquire the kind o f knowledge requisite to so much as identify a witch. How. then, would a witeh-hunter know when he had found a witch'? How would one judge whether the hunt had been a success o ra failure? The witch-hunt would have been brought to an abrupt end by Meno's paradox but for the clear fact that witch-hunters did have some concept o f a witch. The concept was a loose and popular one— it was not based on careful study o f witches, but mainly upon imagination and tradition, or legend. As such, it is not epistemically respectable, but it is enough to get a witch-hunt going. O f course, it was eventually discovered that germs were the real culprits; and when they were, no one was tempted to claim that witches had been discovered, and that they were just a lot smaller than anyone had previously realized. Instead, the belief that witches caused disease was abandoned, and the belief that germs caused disease replaced it. Presumably this has something to do with the fact that germs are just too different from what the loose and popular concept o f a witch required a witch to be. I f it had turned out that there were people causing disease through some mystical means, but that they did not ride Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 50 broomsticks, the loose and popular witch-concept could have been re\ised and applied to them. But revising the popular witch-concept to tit germs is too much. There is not enough o f the original concept left over to ju stify characterizing the new concept as a revised version o f the old. It is a new concept altogether. Curiously, though, contemporary research into the history o f Analytic Philosophy seems to follow a different rule. Research into Analytic Philosophy begins, much like a witch-lumt. with a loose, pre-critical conception o f Analytic Philosopln. based not on careful study, but on popular opinion. Popular opinion, as we have seen, takes Analytic Philosophy to be a school o f philosophy which now exists, and which originated in the early twentieth century. This conception is quite general, and therefore vague w ith regard to the detailed content o f the concept o f Analytic Philosopln: but it is enough to get research into Analvtic Philosophy going. Now. what contemporary historians o f Analytic Philosophy lune found is that there is no feature or set o f features shared bv all and only those philosophers who count as Analysts on the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy. This is tantamount to finding that there are no grounds for holding that these philosophers are members o f the same school, to finding that there is nothing to which the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy corresponds. The researcher into Analytic Philosophy is. at this point, much like the witch-hunter who finds that there is nothing to which his concept o f a witch corresponds, and that the real cause o f disease is something altogether different. It is at this point that the witch-hunter revises not his concept o f witches, but his belief in witches— he rejects the existence o f witches, and accepts the existence o f germs. Contemporary historians o f Analytic Philosophy, on the other hand, seem to retain their belief in the existence o f a school o f Analytic Philosophy, and to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. present themselves as merely revising the concept o f it. However, as with witch- and germ- coneepts. this involves too great a change to count as a mere revision. What we have here is an unheralded replacement o f one concept w ith another. This conceptual shift, in the context o f contemporary work on Analytic Philosophy, gives rise to a subtle equivocation. Almost every author who contributes to the contemporary trend makes some use o f the popular concept o f Analytic Philosopln in providing an initial orientation for his work. Then, with almost perfect unanimity, in the midst o f attempting to clarify the concept o f Analytic Philosophy, these authors gradually coax themselves away from the original concept, ultimately breaking with it altogether and replacing it w ith something w hich does not at all tit w ithin the parameters o f the original concept, all the while using the same term to refer to what is given in the two incompatible conceptions. Clearly, this pattern is a model o f equivocation. Michael Corrado's book gives us very good evidence for supposing that there is indeed an overlooked equivocation inherent in the contemporary trend. I have noted that he conceives o f the subject o f his book as a ty pe o f philosophy founded by Russell, among others. This suggests that it is indeed Analytic Philosophy that he intends to investigate, rather than analy tic philosophy t. or some other entity that might possibly go by that name. However, without rejecting or revising the claim that Russell was a founder o f this type o f philosophy , at the end o f his book Corrado concludes that "analy tic philosophy is. at its best, just good philosophy, and not in any deep way distinguishable from any other sort o f philosophy" (Corrado 1975. 128 f.). Now these two claims appear to be inconsistent. If Russell is a founder o f Analytic Philosophy , Analytic Philosophy could not have existed before Russell: but surely philosophy, even good philosophy, existed before Russell. And Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. if Analytic Philosophy is not distinguishable in any deep wav from anv other sort o f philosophy, what exactly did Russell found? Founding something involves bringing into being something that has not been before: thus, in order to speak o f something as being founded by a particular person at a particular time, it seems that what is founded must be distinguishable from other tilings which came before it. Corrado speaks o f Russell as founding a type o f philosophy, viz.. Analvtic Philosophy, but then he denies that Analytic Philosophy is distinguishable from any other kind o f philosophy. This is tantamount to saving that A nalvtic Philosophy is and is not a school o f philosophy which exists now. and which traces its roots back to the early twentieth century. There is an alternative, however, to supposing that Corrado has fallen into the gross error o f self-contradiction. Instead, we may suppose that he has committed the more subtle error o f equivocation. Corrado is not alone in this. Even when a contemporary work on Analvtic Philosopln does not contain the kind o f apparent contradiction we see in Corrado's book, there is often a striking incongruity between an author's choice o f scope— which, as I have pointed out. rarely extends much bey ond the beginning o f the twentieth century— and his choice o f definition. The difference between the pre-critica! and the critical concepts o f Analvtic Philosopln w ithin the contemporary trend presents us with another situation where we must decide whether charity is warranted: but it seems to me that it is not. and that accepting the contemporary trend in defining A nalvtic Philosophy requires something like the excessive charity required to treat references to phlogiston as references to valence electrons. Indeed, defining Analvtic Philosophy in such a way that it ends up including pre- twentieth-century philosophers is like going on a witch-hunt which culminates in the discovery o f germs, and claiming that the witch-hunt was successful. Not only is it Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. reasonable to feel perplexed and dissatisfied in the face o f such an outcome, it would be remarkable if w e did not. When the villagers send out the hunting party, they believe that success involves a witch being brought back to the village and burnt at the stake. If the hunting party returns with only a vial o f liquid vaccine and a syringe, moves about the village injecting all the inhabitants, and then claims to have successfully accomplished its task, it would be very strange indeed if the v illagers failed to realize that something extraordinary was afoot. In any case, knowing that in the popular mind "analytic philosophy" is commonly taken to designate a school o f philosophy which now exists, and which originated in the early twentieth century, it is genuinely misleading, in a work which purports to be about Analvtic Philosophy, to define it in such a way that it allows pre-tvventieth-century philosophers to count as Analysts, without explaining that the original object o f interest proved to be unreal. The present context o f interest being what it is. the contemporary trend is almost a conceptual "bait-and-svvitch." The difference between a real hait-and- svvitch scam and what we are confronted with in the contemporary trend is that, in the case o f the latter, there is no attempt to defraud. Those who would otherwise be perpetrators are themselves taken in by the equivocation. To see that this is so, consider that to remove the v i I lagers' perplexity, the hunting party needs only to explain that the original object o f their quest was unreal, that the true causes o f disease are germs, and that germs can only be vanquished by the vaccine. Only when the villagers have been informed o f this new conceptual schema w ill they be able to understand and be satisfied with the party's actions. One might think this would be a simple enough task, but it has not been done by those who define "analytic philosophy" in this way. Instead, they perpetuate the illusion of the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5 4 existence of a school called Analytic Philosophy by representing themsehes. not as replacing the loose and popular concept with a more rigorous concept grounded in historical research, but as clarifying the loose and popular concept itself and grounding it in historical research. 2.5 The Alternative to the Contemporary Trend At the beginning o f § 2.4 we were faced with an inconsistent triad which resolved itself into a dilemma. The dilemma consisted in the choice between the propositions that (1) Analvtic Philosopln' is a philosophical school (or at least some sort o f theoretical!) unified philosophical group) and that (2) Analvtic Philosophy originated in the early twentieth century. Whichever proposition we choose to reject, we end up doing violence to the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy. In $ 2.4. I characterized the contemporary trend in defining Analvtic Philosophy as the result o f choosing to reject (2) in favor o f ( I ): and I argued that this is not a legitimate option, since rejecting (2) requires us to detach the name from the context that gave it its present meaning— the meaning relevant to present concerns about Analvtic Philosophy. The alternative is to reject (1). to admit that there are no grounds for maintaining the existence a philosophical school the likes o f which Analytic Philosophy is popularly taken to be. that the existence o f such a school is and always has been an illusion. I f the possibility that Analytic Philosophy as traditionally and popularly understood is an illusion were taken seriously, it would stand to open new avenues for understanding the history o f A nalytic Philosophy. On the one hand, it would immediately remove the need to find a set o f theoretical tenets, i.e., philosophical views, to serve as Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. necessary and sufficient conditions for being an A nalytic philosopher. Necessary and sufficient conditions require a high degree o f definiteness and uniformity: but. if the unity of Analytic Philosophy as traditionally and popularly conceived has been and is illusory, then the philosophical views o f Analytic philosophers have not been uniform, and the contours of the movement as a whole have not been objectively definite— that is to say. the traditional boundaries were arbitrary, the result o f a choice to disregard certain differences and to focus on certain similarities. On the other hand, it would require that a whole new set of questions be asked. An important part o f historical work on Analvtic Philosophy would then consist in explaining how it came to be popularly believed that Nagel's set o f tendencies solidified into a monolithic philosophical school when in fact they did not. why the now obvious differences among the various figures and "sub-schools" o f Analytic Philosophy— the very differences which now prevent us from accepting traditional definitions o f Analytic Philosophy— were not perceived, or at least were not perceived as being substantial enough to prohibit regarding these figures and groups as members o f the same school, and so on. The attempt to answer such questions might lead us to investigate issues such as what, in the context o f the main currents o f Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century, was taken to be important, methodologically and or substantively, in determining one's philosophical orientations and allegiances, and whether there were any general views about the nature o f philosophy, or philosophical knowledge, or knowledge in general, or o f the world, etc.. which might explain the widespread employment o f a standard o f appraisal capable not only o f allowing but leading people to disregard or play- down what we are now beginning to see as important differences. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5(i These are the sorts o f issues I am interested in addressing. I believe that onlv bv directing our attention to questions such as these w ill we have any chance o f getting at the true nature o f Analvtic Philosophy. 2.6 The Popular Conception Expanded So far in this chapter. [ have presented two misconceptions o f Analytic Philosophy: the popular conception o f A nalytic Philosopln and the misconception associated w ith the contemporary trend in defining Analytic Philosophy. The latter is to be avoided. The former, however, must be embraced as part of our true subject matter. We are no longer studying a philosophical school which originated around the turn o f the twentieth century: instead, we are studying the origin and development o f the misconception that such a school ever existed. An essential part o f this investigation will be to identify the real (non-illusorv) factors in British. Austrian, and American philosopln and philosophical culture, from around the turn o f the twentieth century onwards, which originally motivated the misconception and which subsequently allowed it to take root and to grow . As I pointed out in 2.5. one benefit o f regarding Analvtic Philosophy as an illusion is that it removes the need to prov ide a definition o f Analy tic Philosophy in terms o f necessary and sufficient conditions— or at least not the kind o f conditions that would be required to define a genuine school o f philosophy . I f it was a mistake to see among the founding fathers o f Analy tic Philosophy the unity proper to a philosophical school, then it is clearly idle to look for definite tenets that rigorously unify those philosophers who. according to tradition, count as Analysts. On the other hand, though there never were any Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. necessary or sufficient conditions for being an Analytic philosopher, there may have been something like necessary and/or sufficient conditions for being thought an Analvtic philosopher. We are not here talking about conditions in the strict sense, such that one can think or believe (that) x if and only i f some set o f non-vacuous criteria are met (where things like having the requisite conceptual apparatus count as vacuous criteria). As a matter o f mere psychology, it seems wrong to suggest that there are any such constraints upon belief. We may. however, try to find what, in specific cases, contributed to a philosopher's being thought o f as Analytic, i.e.. what, in the case of. e.g.. Moore. Russell. W ittgenstein, and Carnap, led people generally to think o f these figures as philosophical comrades in arms. On the basis o f such research, we may generalize and say that, in the context o f a certain philosophical culture, during a certain period o f time, v was generally sufficient ( in a contingent way. to be sure) to be counted an Analytic philosopher. In doing so we arc. like Nagel, talking about tendencies. This talk o f tendencies gives a new importance to what in § 1.3 I identified as characteristic marks o f Analytic Philosophy. Contemporary research has shown that it is a mistake to treat such marks as necessary- and/or sufficient conditions o f Analytic Philosophy , even though some o f these were w idely accepted as such in times past. Since what we are interested in is a misconception, however, the fact that these marks were mistakenly thought to be unify ing features, far from making them irrelevant and useless, places them at the center o f our inquiry. They are o f central importance because people have tended, mistakenly or not. to think o f Analytic Philosophy in terms o f these marks. Indeed, many o f them have figured, at one time or another, among the contents o f the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy: and many still do. W hat's more, insofar as Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. people have tended to think o f Analytic Philosophy in these terms, the approximation o f one or more o f these views in a given philosopher's work may have been sufficient (in the general and contingent way discussed above) for a philosopher to have been counted an Analyst. Thus, these characteristic marks have helped to constitute the illusion in which we are interested. In 2.1 I described the popular conception in the most minimal and general o f terms. W hile it is true that people tend to think o f Analytic Philosophy as a school o f philosophy that originated around the turn o f the twentieth century, that is not all they tend to think about it. Traditionally, people have tended to think o f it as a school with a definite character. Specifically, for most o f its history . Analy tic Philosophy has been thought o f as having a linguistic character, i.e.. as having linguistic methods and a linguistic subject matter. It has long been thought that unity o f Analytic Philosophy consisted in agreement on metaphilosophical issues, on theoretical points concerning fundamental procedural issues in philosophy, like methodology and subject matter, as opposed to views on non procedural issues such as whether the fundamental existences are atoms or compounds, substances or "occasions." whether there is one. two. or more ultimate kinds o f substance, w hether there are moral facts and what their grounds are. etc. Furthermore, until roughly the 1%0's. it was almost universally believed that the general metaphilosophical theory by which Analytic Philosophy was unified consisted in the view that language is the proper subject-matter o f philosophy, and the proper philosophical method is linguistic analysis. Indeed, though there is currently no clear answer to the question hi what does the unity of Analytic Philosophy consist:'. there w as a time w hen this question could hav e been answered with confidence, if not with complete precision. This was the time when Analytic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Philosophy was coextensive w ith linguistic philosophy. During this period. Analytic philosophers thought that what unified them was the linguistic nature o f their enterprise. Strawson represents the common attitude o f this period when he says ''[Logical) Atomists. [Logical) Positivists, and Professor Moore, all have something in common, even if it is only a word to be pronounced w ith approval. The word is 'analysis'" (Strawson 1963. p. 97). Not surprisingly, it was thought that the unity o f Analytic Philosophy consisted in the adoption o f analysis as a method in philosophy. But it was not the practice o f mere analysis that was thought to u n ify them. Mere analysis is common not only to philosophers in all periods o f history, but also to scientists (e.g.. chemical analysis), and perhaps practitioners in other fields as well. But. if not mere analysis, then it must be a definite type o f analysis. As I pointed out earlier, the kinds o f objects involved in analysis are crucial in distinguishing one type o f analysis from another, and ''analysis" meant different things for Moore, the Logical Atomists. and the Logical Positivists precisely because each had a different view o f the nature o f the objects involved in analysis. We shall look more closely at these differences in chapter 6. At present I want to point out that, although he is aware o f the differences, Strawson rejects them as unimportant, apparently believing that all these different objects ultimately fell under the category "linguistic entity": It does not matter much ... [w hat we say the objects o f analysis are|. ... Maybe it is best to say. as M oore always said, that the objects o f analysis were propositions. This answer, whatever its shortcomings, emphasizes, without over-emphasizing, the linguistic nature o f the enterprise, the preoccupation w ith meaning. For. however we describe the objects o f analysis, particular analyses ... always looked much the same. A sentence, representative o f a class o f sentences belonging to the same topic, was supposed to be elucidated by the framing o f another sentence. (Strawson 1963. p. 98) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 60 Thus, in summing up the view o f analysis which allowed philosophers o f Strawson's stripe to count Moore, the Logical Atomists. the Logical Positivists, and others as members o f the same school. Strawson explains that "the general conception o f analysis was that o f a kind o f translation, or. perhaps better, a kind o f paraphrase" (ibid.. p. 99). Both o f these are. o f course, linguistic activities. Like Strawson. Pap took the unity o f Analvtic Philosophy to consist in ''the unanimous practice o f the analytic method" (Pap 1949. ix ); and though he objected to the characterization o f analysis as translation (ibid.. p. 453). he clearly conceived o f it as a linguistic undertaking. For example, in justifying his view that Analytic Philosophy was continuous with much philosophy in the Great Tradition. Pap clearly identities "questions ol logical analysis" with questions about word-meaning: "in general, all the typically philosophical questions o f the form 'what is the nature o f A" can be interpreted a . - > questions ol logical analysis, o f the form 'what is the meaning o f the word 'A- or of any synonym thereof.' or 'what is the meaning o f sentences containing the word ’A "" (Pap 1949. p. vii). I bus he goes on to describe the Soeratic dialectic as "a method o f clarifying meanings, applied prim arily to moral terms" and to say that Aristotle's question in the Posterior Analytics "what is the nature o f scientific knowledge?" can be reformulated as "what does one mean when one says one has scientific knowledge o f a certain state o f affairs'.’" (ibid.. p. vii). Again, in discussing the distinction between Analvtic Philosopln and traditional metaphysics. Pap says: It is not mere 'narrowness' o f interests that leads analy tic philosophers to keep away from metaphysics, but positive reasons against the fertility o f metaphysics as a cognitive enterprise. The evaluation o f these reasons, which mainly grow in the soil o f semantics, is itself a concern o f analytic philosophy, not metaphysics. Hence metaphysicians have to become, at Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 61 least temporarily, analytic philosophers i f they seriously want to discuss the question whether metaphysics, as a cognitive enterprise, a source o f genuine knowledge, is possible. (Pap 1949. p. 12) Metaphysicians cannot evaluate the reasons for the rejection o f traditional metaphysics without becoming Analytic philosophers bccciii.sc such evaluation requires them to investigate the meanings o f words. This indicates that Pap took the use o f linguistic analysis to be a necessary and sufficient condition o f being an Analytic philosopher. The foregoing statements show that the illusion o f Analvtic Philosophy's units originally depended upon the mistaken view that all canonical Analvtic philosophers accepted the metaphilosophical view that language was the subject matter o f philosophy and linguistic analysis was its method. It is the real philosophical phenomena behind this mistaken view that we must find in order to understand the true nature o f Analvtic Philosophy. Before we begin to search for those real phenomena, however, we shall expand the popular conception o f Analvtic Philosopln further, in the hope that the expanded concept might suggest a greater number o f clues as to the real phenomena behind the illusion. Although Analytic Philosophy is no longer thought to be the same thing as linguistic philosophy, its original linguistic character continues to color contemporary thought about Analvtic Philosophy. For example. Louis Pojman has recently claimed that "Analvtic Philosophy is centered on language and logic, analyzing the meanings o f words and sentences even as it analyzes arguments and builds comparatively modest epistemological and metaphysical theories" (Pojman 2001, p. I ). This, he says, constitutes a "simplistic but m eaningful" characterization o f Analvtic Philosophy. It is this view o f the unity o f Analytic Philosophy that stands behind the popular idea that Analytic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Philosopln- was born in the linguistic turn. However, just as the nature o f Analvtic Philosopln- is uncertain, so is the nature o f the linguistic turn. Dummett locates the origin ot the linguistic turn in paragraph 62 o f Frege's Foundations of Arithm etic, a paragraph in which Frege starts out talking about numbers and ends up talking about the meanings o f sentences containing number-vvords (Dummett 1991. P. I l l ; cf. M onk 1996a). This is supposed to be the initial manifestation o f what turns out to be Frege's acceptance o f the threefold view that the goal o f philosophy is the analysis o f thought, the study o f thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study o f thinking, and the only proper method for analyzing thought consists in the analysis o f language. I have already made reference to Monk's criticism that this is far too narrow a conception o f Analytic Philosophy, for it excludes, among others. Bertrand Russell from the ranks o f the Analysts. By the same token, it is lar too narrow a conception o f the linguistic turn, if we are to take the v iew that Analytic Philosophy was born in the linguistic turn. Over against Dummet's view, we must develop a more general and inclusive conception o f the linguistic turn. Also, we must not lim it our conception o f the linguistic turn to the theoretical views involved. What makes both Analytic Philosophy and the linguistic turn worth discussing today is the vast impact they have had on the way philosophy is done. The theoretical views at the core o f these phenomena would not be important in the way they presently are if they had not been widely accepted. Thus, when we are interested in the linguistic turn. or. for that matter, in Analytic Philosophy, we are not merely interested in a theory and its origin, but in its popularization— its comparatively rapid assimilation into the philosophical mainstream. Thus, we might propose as criteria for an adequate conception o f the linguistic turn, first, that it be broad enough to capture all Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 63 canonical figures from the early phases o f Analytic Philosophy, and. second, that it characterizes the turn not merely as the introduction, blit as the popularization o f a theorv. A third criterion for an adequate conception o f the linguistic turn is that it ought to be able to account for what is. perhaps, the most fundamental feature o f the Analytic self- image— viz.. the revolutionary character o f Analytic Philosophy . Traditionally. Analytic Philosophy's origin in the early twentieth century has been thought o f not merely as the beginning o f yet another philosophical school, but as the beginning o f a new era in philosophy-at-large. By the middle o f the twentieth century Analy tic Philosophy was widely believed to have brought about a revolution in philosophy. This was no accident: fundamental change in the way philosophy was done was the express goal o f manv early Analysts. As Hacker observes: "each phase o f the analytic movement [until 1970] was motivated by a revolutionary fervor. The protagonists passionately believed that they were ridding philosophy o f intellectual pretensions, clearing the Augean stables o f accumulated refuse, and putting the subject on a fresh footing" (Hacker 1998. pp. 24 f). One important effect o f recent scholarship is that it has enabled us to see the important differences between the "micro-revolutions" w ithin the Analytic movement. However, we must not lose sight o f the fact that Analytic Philosophy was once popularly perceived to have brought about a "macro-revolution" in philosophy-at-large, and that the various phases o f Analy tic Philosophy , different though they may have been, were taken to be phases o f one and the same movement precisely because they were seen to be working within the parameters o f the new regime instituted by this macro-revolution. So. our conception o f the linguistic turn must be a conception o f the popularization o f a metaphilosophical theory which was thought to be revolutionary, and which was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 64 embodied in the work o f canonical figures from the early phases o f Analytic Philosophy such as Russell. Moore, and Wittgenstein. It seems to me that these criteria w ill be met if we take the linguistic turn to consist in the acceptance, by a large number o f influential philosophers, o f the view that the proper or preferred subject-matter o f philosophy is language, and that the proper or preferred philosophical methods are linguistic. In many o f its aspects— even in some o l its linguistic aspects— there were harbingers o f Analvtic Philosophy long before there was any cultural phenomenon that could have been called the linguistic turn. However, no influential figure prior to the earlv part o f the twentieth eenturv held a complete view o f philosophy based on language and linguistic methods. According to tradition, this view, along with the apparatus which made it seem plausible, originated with Moore and Russell around the turn o f the century. As far as I am aware, it is first explicitly stated in the early 1920s. in Wittgenstein's Tnictulus. We have seen this view expressed by Strawson and Pap. The same view is expressed by the Logical Positivists. Gilbert Ryle. John Wisdom, and others into the 1960s. It is clearly more inclusive than Dum m ett’s threefold view. O f all the features popularlv associated with Analvtic Philosopln in its early phases, its linguistic character, thus understood, is the only one which stands out as involving a view at once truly novel, capable o f providing the appearance o f a procedural rev olution in philosophy-at-large, and capable o f prov iding the appearance o f unity among Analvtic Philosophy's major figures and factions from 1900 through the 1960s. O f course, it is no longer possible to maintain the view that Analvtic Philosopln is linguistic philosophy, because it is no longer even prinui facie the case that Analvtic philosophers use linguistic methods. Between I960 and 1970 there began a shift away Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 65 from linguistic philosophy among Analytic philosophers. Richard Rorty places his conversion from linguistic philosophy somewhere between 1965 and 1975 (Rorty 1992. p. 571). a ten year span which saw the publication o f books such as Mundle's Critique o f linguistic philosophy (1970) and Hacking's Why Docs Language Matter to I'hilosophyH 1975). In the aftermath of the completed shift. Rorty could write: to say that linguistic philosophy is now behind us is o f course not to sav that analytic philosophy is behind us. but only to say that most o f those who call themselves "analytic philosophers' would now reject the epithet "linguistic philosophers' and would not describe themselves as "applying linguistic methods.' (Rorty 1992. p. 374. note 9) fhe state o f affairs resulting from this shift is very peculiar. Even though, prior to the shilt. it was almost universally believed that linguistic analysis was the beating heart o f Analvtic Philosophy, the abandonment o f linguistic methods did not. in the minds o f Analytic philosophers, threaten the life o f their school. Thus the shift away from linguistic philosopln must have involved not only a change in method and subject matter, but also a change in the governing conception o f Analytic Philosophy. The continued use o f the name ""Analvtic Philosophy" indicates that this conceptual change was widely perceived as a mere modification o f the concept o f Analytic Philosophy. It is worth wondering, howev er, whether it did not involve, like the conceptual shift in the contemporary trend, too great a change to count as a modification o f the same concept, w hether this was not. as in the contemporary trend, a eovert replacement o f one concept with another. If it did. and if it was. this would be yet another factor contributing to our present misconception o f Analvtic Philosopln. 1 w ill say more on this later: for now, we shall merely keep this in mind as a possibility. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 66 In any case, that Analytic Philosophy can no longer be seen as having a linguistic character does not dim inish the fact that it once was seen that wav. Moreover, far from making its formerly-perceived linguistic character irrelevant to the task o f understanding the real factors behind the illusion o f Analytic Philosophy, it actually reveals how essential it is in developing such an understanding: for only after its linguistic character had been abandoned did it become a problem for Analytic Philosophy to define itself. In fact, there seems to be a more complex correlation linking Analytic Philosophy's ability to define itsell not onlv to its linguistic nature, but linking both of these to it>. re\olutionarv character. A ll o f these died out at approximately the same time, which suggests that Analytic Philosophy's unity as originally perceived was bound up with its original revolutionary and linguistic character. O f course, its revolutionarv character depended largely on its novel, linguistic view o f the subject matter and methods o f philosophy Thus the original linguistic character of Analytic Philosophy and associated features like its revolutionary nature cannot be disregarded in investigating the origin and growth o f the illusion o f Analvtic Philosophy's unit} . I w ill bring this chapter to a close by noting the newly expanded content o f our concept o f Analytic Philosophy: it is no longer to be regarded merelv as a school o f philosophy which originated around the turn o f the twentieth century: but as a school o f philosophy whose origination, around the turn o f the twentieth century and subsequent popularization had largely to do with the revolutionary, linguistic approach to philosopln it then advocated. This (ntis-) conception o f Analvtic Philosophy w ill guide us as we inv estigate the illusion o f Analytic Philosophy's unity. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Part II: Scientism as the Driving Force Behind Analytic Philosophy Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 68 3. Traditional Philosophy Let us begin by turning our attention to the revolutionary character o f Analytic Philosophy. This is not itself a point o f philosophical units. but it is a point o f units nonetheless, and one which points to an ideological, and hence philosophical, units. Resolution, in the sense we are here concerned svith. involves the overthrow o f some established regime by some entity opposed to it. and the institution o f a ness regime by that entity, ['lie effort necessary to bring about a change o f this sort requires at least a commitment to the view that the old regime is somehow tlassed. furthermore, if the old regime is to be decisively replaced by one and onls one ness regime, as is generally assumed to hase been the case in the Analytic resolution, the entity sshich stimulates the change must be committed to the one ideology o f that ness regime. The relesant entity in the case o f a philosophical res olution ssould hase to be. o f course, a philosopher or group o f philosophers. Thus sse hase reason to believe that, somesshere in the earls histors o f Analytic Philosophs, sse shall be able to find a group o f philosophers united in their opposition to a pre-existing regime. It has been traditional Is accepted that the regime oserthrossn by Analytic Philosophy is sshat is nossadays frequently called "traditional" philosophs. In the early tssentieth century, it svas usually called "speculative" philosophs . In this section. I s s ill try to characterize traditional/speculative philosophy. Part o f the d ifficu lty facing contemporary Analytic Philosophs is that it seems to consist in a discussion o f a number o f genuinels perplexing but relatisels disconnected issues. At one time in the not so distant past, one could hase gathered mans o f the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 69 seemingly discrete problems discussed by Analytic philosophers and classified them under the heading "metaphysics." G. E. Moore, for example, held that: ... a great class o f subordinate philosophical problems consist in discussing whether the great classes o f things I have mentioned (e.g. material objects, minds. God) do exist or do not. or whether we are simply ignorant as to whether they do or not: and also in try ing to define these classes and considering how they are related to one another. A great deal of philosophy has consisted in discussing these questions with regard to God. the future life, matter, minds. Space and Time. And all these problems could be said to belong to that department o f philosophy which is called Metaphysics. (Moore 1953. pp. 24 f.) Moore took metaphy sics to involve discussing the existence, nature, and relations o f "great classes o f things." by which he seems to have meant general or fundamental classes— e.g.. matter and mind are \ery general classes, and God. understood as first-cause, is a fundamental one. Similarly. Richard Taylor maintains that "to think metaphysically is to think, without arbitrariness and dogmatism, on the most basic problems o f existence. The problems are basic in the sense that they are fundamental, that much depends on them ..." (Faylor 1963. p. I f.). Likewise. Chisholm thought that metaphysics has to do with "understanding the fundamental categories o f reality " (Chisholm 1989. p. vii). But that is not all. By discussing these great classes o f things. Moore thought that one could arrive at a picture o f reality-as-a-whole, what he called "a general description o f the whole universe": ... the most important and interesting thing which philosophers have tried to do is no less than this; namely: to give a general description of the whole universe, mentioning all the most important kinds o f things which we know to be in it. considering how far it is likely that there are in it important kinds o f things w hich we do not absolutely know to be in it. and also considering the most important ways in which these various kinds o f things are related to one another. I w ill call all this, for short, "giving a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 70 general description o f the whole universe." and hence w ill say that the first and most important problem o f philosophy is: to give a general description o f the whole universe. (Moore 1953. pp. I f.) This is a good initial characterization o f the project o f speculative metaphysics, especially insofar as it reveals that the aim o f that project is to arrive at a general description o f the whale universe, a description in terms o f kinds and their relations. However, it is deficient in at least the following respect: Moore characterizes the kinds in terms o f which the universe is to be described as important', but importance seems to be a relative qualitv— something is important to someone, or it is important fo r something. One o f the original criticisms made against traditional philosophy by Analytic philosophers was that speculative philosophers tended to give general descriptions o f the universe in terms o f the kinds they found to be most important to them, or most important fo r their purposes, with the result that a variety o f apparently incompatible descriptions were produced: ...the speculative philosopher is struck by the fact that some aspect o f experience is o f supreme importance to human beings. Round this aspect o f experience he thinks all other aspects should be organized They should be subordinated to it. He expresses this insight by declaring that this aspect o f things is what is alone ultimately real. ... Thus the speculative philosopher is guilty o f a gross non sequitur. He argues from the humanlv important to the real. It simply does not follow that what is important is more real, or that what is unimportant is unreal. But to com m it this fallacy is precisely the normal procedure o f the speculative philosopher. It is the method o f speculativ e philosophy. (Stace 1943. p. II7)'S W hile arguing from the humanlv important to the real has been a problem in many cases of speculative philosophy, it seems to me an overstatement to say that it is the normal procedure o f the speculative philosopher. Certainly Moore would not have wanted to * Stace is here paraphrasing Professor M urphy's criticism o f speculative philosophy. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. support such a conception o f speculative philosophy, being, as he was. one o f the two principal adversaries o f British Idealism— a system akin to the sort described by Stace— and strongly committed to a commonsense realism. Indeed. Moore likely would have objected to such fallacious reasoning as a misuse o f metaphysical speculation. Thus, very likely. Moore meant by "im portant" something like fundamental, since fundamentality seems to involve a good bit more objectivity than mere importance. Taken this way. M oore's description o f what he took to be the "first and most important problem o f philosophy" seems to agree with Alfred North Whitehead's description o f speculative philosophy: Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system o f general ideas in terms o f which e\ery element o f our experience can be interpreted. By this notion o f 'interpretation' I mean that everything o f which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall hav e the character of a particular instance o f the general scheme. Thus the philosophical scheme should be coherent, iogical. and. in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Mere 'applicable' means that some items o f experience are thus interpretable, and 'adequate' means that there are no items incapable o f such interpretation. (Whitehead 1941. p. 4) The common picture that emerges from these remarks is that the ultimate aim o f traditional philosophy is to discover a set o f "general ideas" or "great classes" or "kinds" capable o f capturing every— perhaps even, passible— existing thing, and to develop a view o f reality-as-a-whole by classifying all things according to their most general kinds, and determining the necessary relationships which obtain among them insofar as they are things o f those kinds. This project was first given explicit treatment by Aristotle, who described metaphysics as the science o f being qua being. Michael Loux has described the Aristotelian project v ery clearly: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 72 what is distinctive about metaphysics [conceived as the science o f being qua being] is the way in which it examines [the objects o f the other sciences]: it examines them from a particular perspective, from the perspective o f their being beings or things that exist. So metaphysics considers things as beings or as existents and attempts to specifv the properties or features they exhibit just insofar as they are beings or existents. Accordingly, it seems to understand not merely the concept o f being, but also very general concepts like unity or identity, difference, similarity, and dissim ilarity that apply to everything that there is. And central to metaphysics understood as a universal science is the delineation o f what Aristotle calls categories. These are the highest or most general kinds under which things fall. What the metaphysician is supposed to do is to identify those highest kinds, to specify the features peculiar to each category, and to identify the relations that tie the different categories together: and by doing this, the metaphysician supposedly provides us with a map o f the structure o f all that there is. (Loux I 998. p. 4) Instances o f traditional philosophy can be found in all periods o f philosophical history, and in figures from Thales to Whitehead and Russell. O f course, not every philosopher is known for being a so-called "system-builder." Some are notable only for their work on issues more specific than the nature o f reality-as-a-whole. e.g.. the nature o f minds, the nature o f matter, the nature o f perception, the nature o f moral obligation, etc. This might be called specific or partial philosophical inquiry. Nonetheless, these more specific issues can be seen as forming part o f the broader task o f traditional philosophy . Dallas W illard characterizes the traditional business o f metaphy sics as. "the exploration o f (a thing's] factors to determine the sununum genus o f each, as well as the higher species which fall under that genus" (W illard 1967. p. 523). On this understanding, metaphysics is limited neither to the investigation o f reality at the most general level, nor o f reality as a whole at any level o f generality. It can involve investigation at the intervening levels o f generality , those between the ultimate or categorial level and the level o f particularity , and investigation into various parts o f reality at those various levels. At those intervening Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 73 levels, and in those various parts, the task is much the same as at the uppermost level o f generality: to define, or discover the nature of. things insofar as thev are things o f a kind, and to determine their relations to other kinds o f things— in effect to prov ide a portion o f that larger map which it is the ultimate aim o f traditional philosophy to prov ide. The project o f giving a general description o f the whole universe rarely takes the form o f providing a static taxonomy o f the items in one's ontology, as these abstract descriptions might seem to suggest. The tendency o f traditional "system building" philosophers, especially in the era o f post-kantian romanticism which falls immediately prior to the advent o f Analytic Philosophy, was to knit their categories together into an active picture o f the way the world is and the way it "w orks" at the most general and ultimate level. Such a picture o f reality at its most fundamental, and hence most real, level is one o f the things that is meant by Weltanschauung (worldview). The construction o f weltanschauungen seems to be just as much a part o f traditional philosophy as the delineation o f categories. One reason for this is that by creating a theory o f categories, one automatically creates a Weltanschauung. I low ev er, not ev ery Weltanschauung is a picture o f the world at its most general level, framed in terms o f the world's most basic constituents. In fact, not every Weltanschauung is philosophical. Some are religious or cultural. The defining quality o f a philosophical Weltanschauung is its putative rationality— its internal logical consistency and its grounding in phenomena which, upon at least some measure of critical review, seem to be apodictically given. There is thus a range o f possible types for weltanschauungen o f the genuinely philosophical variety in terms o f the levels o f generality at which they may be constructed. One need not restrict their construction o f worid-pictures to the most general level o f reality , but may Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. develop a view o f the world at levels o f lesser generality. Indeed, there is room for philosophical weltansclutuungen which depict the world in terms o f the humanly important, even the ultimately important to/for humans. Still, from the standpoint of traditional philosophy , since items o f lesser generality are thought o f as falling under more general types, any Weltanschauung which fails to portray the world at the ultimate level of generality w ill always be taken to involve or imply an ultimate Weltanschauung. The lact that philosophical speculation can occur at varying levels o f generality is one of the factors behind the traditional designation "first philosophy." The very idea o f a first philosophy implies a gradation among the issues and objects attended to in philosophical study. In traditional philosophy, first p' M r ' v has to do with the ultimate and most general features o f reality, the categorial features, to use the Aristotelian terminology. As the descriptions from Whitehead and Loux indicate, the categories are logically prior to all other constituents o f reality , in that they prov ide the ultimate elements in terms o f which all other constituents o f reality can be explained or assayed. As such, the facts concerning these ultimate features o f reality are supposed to constitute a set of philosophical "first principles" which superintend the investigation o f other philosophical issues at lesser levels o f generality . Furthermore, philosophical researches at lesser levels o f generality may be understood to presuppose, or, alternatively, to imply, a set o f first principles, and hence a theory o f categories and a Weltanschauung. The foregoing discussion has drawn attention to four main features o f traditional philosophy . First, traditional philosophy recognizes a graduated structure at least within the order o f knowledge ( if not also within the order o f being), such that all particulars arc subsumed under general types, and those general types are subsumed under more general Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ^ 75 types. and so-on. until one reaches an ultimate level o f generality— the most general types. Second, these most general types and the truths about them are taken to govern truths about the things subsumed by them— they provide the "first principles" germane to the studv o f any portion o f the universe at levels o f lesser generality, and even at the level o f particularity. Thus, third, while traditional philosophy recognizes the legitimacy o f both partial philosophical inquiry and o f inquiry at the intermediate levels o f generality, its principal business is to come to an understanding o f the world in terms o f the most general types, and thus to develop a Weltanschauung. Fourth, this endeavor is to be carried out under the guidance o f reason, which, among other things, allows us to recognize those "governing" relationships mentioned in the second point, above. As I stated at the beginning o f this section, part o f the original revolutionary character, and hence part o f the unity o f Analy tic Philosophy as originally perceiv ed, had to do w ith its opposition to the business o f traditional philosophy . Analytic philosophers have tended to exhibit a clear lack o f interest in issues of the Weltanschauung variety, in general and fundamental truths and in a “ first-principles" approach to philosophy. Carre has observed that "the story o f modern beliefs concerning first principles is the story o f [the| extension o f the methods and categories o f natural science" (1949. p. 237). This is also part o f the story o f Analytic Philosophy . It is to this story that we shall now turn. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 76 4. The Challenge of the Modern Sciences 4.1. Why focus on science? I have been critical o f the contemporary trend in defining Analytic Philosophy; but the trend is not entirely without merit, for it is a response to at least three very important tacts: ( I ) the fact that there is simply no theoretical position shared by all and only canonical Analytic philosophers. (2) the fact that there are substantial points o f continuity between Analytic Philosophy and pre-Analytic Philosophy, and (3) the fact that these points o f continuity seem to be more fundamental to explaining the nature o f Analytic Philosophy than traditional defining marks (the likes o f which I have characterized as illusory). The definitions which contribute to the contemporary trend at least have the virtue of pointing in the direction o f these facts, which have been too long overlooked. I'hey also have the closely related virtue o f being able to dispel certain popular myths about Analytic Philosophy. For example, given the substantial points o f continuity between Analytic Philosophy and pre-Analytic Philosophy, one might wonder whether the emergence o f Analytic Philosophy in the linguistic turn was in fact a genuine philosophical revolution. Certainly, it generated a revolution in philosophical culture— it is undeniable that Analy tic Philosophy w on a sort o f cultural battle involv ing such things as prestige and control o f institutions and so on— but it is worth wondering whether there was indeed any substantial philosophical innovation involved in this cultural revolution. In its early and m iddle phases, one feature o f Analytic Philosophy that was often cited as an example of revolutionary intellectual innovation was its development o f "powerful techni(.|ues" for solving, dissolving, or otherwise putting to rest traditional philosophical problems. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Usually, a person speaking o f these "powerful techniques" had in mind logical or linguistic analysis. However, given that both these techniques eventually fell out o f favor and are now all but forgotten, one might wonder if there really was ever anything to them. Looking back over a hundred years o f Analvtic Philosophy, it is difficult to find even one traditional philosophical problem that has been permanently put to rest. Indeed, if their power for dissolv ing problems was real, why were they abandoned'.’ And if there was really no power in the techniques for solv ing problems, it is reasonable to doubt that there was ever any real intellectual innovation, and thus whether there was a real philosophical revolution. So. the contemporary trend is not without its v irtues. However, one o f its primary virtues— v i/.. its acknowledgement o f the substantial continuities between Analytic and pre-Analytic Philosophy as being the real and really important factors operative in Analytic Philosophy— also serv es as a stumbling block. The main fault o f the contemporary trend consists in the framing o f new definitions o f Analv tic Philosophy on the basis o f one or another point o f continuity, o f treating one or another point o f continuitv as a defining mark which is supposed to separate Analvtic from non-Analytic Philosophy. This has the effect o f distorting both our conception o f Analv tic Philosophv and the facts concerning its origination and its rise to power, for both of these inv olv ed the w idespread impression that there had been a philosophical revolution, complete with the emergence of a new. unified philosophical regime. The main problem with definitions which follow the contemporary trend is that they provide no way o f explaining the fact that, whether there is or ever was any real philosophical unity in Analytic Philosophy, it was for a long time thought that there was. and that it consisted in a metaphilosophical view according to which the nature Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ot the philosophical enterprise was linguistic. In other words, it does not explain the illusion which, as I have tried to show, was central to the cultural revolution that Analvtic Philosophy certainly did bring about. I believe that, in order to come to an adequate understanding o f Analvtic Philosophv. we must agree with the contemporary trend that there are substantial points o f continuity between Analytic and pre-Analytic Philosophv. but we must refrain from attempting to define Analvtic Philosophy in terms o f any o f those points. Analvtic Philosophv as popularly conceived is an illusion, and insofar as there was a genuine philosophical program that embodied the otherwise illusory features associated with Analvtic Philosophv (as in the case of the Logical Positivists, for example), it has fallen apart. In attempting to develop an adequate understanding o f Analvtic Philosophv. we must abandon the quest for unity, and look instead for an explanation for the perceived unitv. finis, we must search among the relevant points o f eontinuitv for ones which might explain the origin and popularization o f the illusion, as well as the mistaken belief that what turned out to be a bankrupt philosophical program not only might succeed, but had succeeded, and in fact had "powerful techniques" for solving or dissolving the problems o f traditional philosophv. The problem w ith the contemporary trend, seen from this angle, is not that it focuses on theoretical views which serve as points o f continuity between Analvtic and pre- Analytic Philosophv. The problem is that it focuses on the wrong points o f eontinuitv with the wrong end in mind. It seeks to define where it ought to explain, and it focuses on points o f eontinuitv which stand no chance o f explaining what needs to be explained. Take, for example, a recent definition o f Analv tic Philosophv proposed by Ray Monk. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. According to Monk, we ought to look for the unity o f Analytic Philosophv in a mctaphilosophical stance which makes the task o f philosophy to include analysis. I have suggested that any definition involving analy sis must specify a type o f analysis in terms o f the nature ot the unulysunda. Monk seems to disagree. Using as a point o f unity a v ague conception ot analysis which is supposed to capture philosophical activity only. Monk proceeds to carve up the philosophical world in such a way that Frege. Russell. Meinong and Husserl count as Analytic philosophers while Wittgenstein does not. Contrary to my claims about the importance o f atudysanda in getting clear about analy sis. M onk says: It matters comparatively little. I think, whether a philosopher takes him self to be analysing language or the world, whether he conceives the analysis o f thought to proceed through the analysis o f sentences, or whether he thinks the analysis o f sentences proceeds through the analysis o f psychology . What matters, what distinguishes Frege. Russell. Meinong and Husserl from Wittgenstein is that thev believe in analvsis at all. (Monk 1996a. p. 14)'’ So. it turns out on M onk's view that "the opposite o f'a n a lytica l' is neither 'continental' nor 'phenomenological' but rather ' Wittgensteinian ™ (M onk 1996a. p. 11). To count Meinong and Husserl among the Analysts while excluding Wittgenstein is unquestionably contrary to tradition. In fact, one might imagine that no more striking example could be found o f a definition which does violence to the traditional and popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy. What is the justification for this view? Monk believes, after the manner o f traditional philosophy, that certain matters are more ' As we shall shortly see. it mattered quite a lot to the development o f the illusion what one was analyzing: rather, more importantly, what one was not analyzing. In order for analysis to catch on as a method in philosophy, the appearance o f figures not claiming loudly to analy ze subjective or transcendent objects was required: and. in order to maintain the unity o f the movement, the amdysanda had to be linguistic. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 80 fundamental than others in determining one's philosophical orientations and allegiances.1 " He insists that "Wittgenstein's resolute rejection o f the idea that it is the task o f philosophy to provide theories and doctrines is o f far more fundamental importance than the relatively superficial fact that he. like Frege, adopted a more or less linguistic method." Since M onk sees analysis as a necessary methodological ingredient in providing philosophical theories and doctrines, he concludes that “ Wittgenstein was not an analytical philosopher in the simple and straightforward sense that he did not believe in analysis"' (M onk 1996a. p. 12). In proposing this definition. Monk is guided by the facts that certain issues are more fundamental than others in determining one's philosophical orientations and allegiances, and that metaphilosophical issues are relatively fundamental in the debate over the nature o f Analytic Philosophy, and thus also in deciding who counts as an Analvst and who doesn't. In searching for a sufficiently fundamental metaphilosophical position. Monk lights upon the very general metaphilosophical view that philosophy involves analysis. Unquestionably, this is a real point o f fundamental unity not only among the philosophers he mentions, but many others from the whole history o f philosophv. Just as certainlv. however, this point o f unity has little to do with the specific issues concerning M onk suggests that one's metaphilosophical stance is o f very great importance in this regard: “ the question at stake. I believe, in providing broad characterizations o f philosophical points o f view, is what one thinks philosophy is and what it can achieve" (M onk 1996a. p. 12). This observation is surely shaped by M onk's context and his interest. One can think o f cases in which metaphilosophical theories might not be the prim ary issue at stake in providing broad characterizations o f philosophical points o f view . The question at stake might be a view about the nature o f the world or o f know ledge or o f moral obligation: hence the general terms "Platonism." "nom inalism ." "rationalism ." "em piricism ." "eudaimonism." "utilitarianism ," and so on. These terms, which are associated with broad characterizations o f philosophical points o f v iew, do not have to do with metaphilosophical issues (though such issues might be implied by the theories involved). However, in the specific context o f the debate over the nature o f Analvtic Philosophy, the question at stake is ultim ately metaphilosophical. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 81 the rise o f Analytic Philosophy as an approach to philosophy distinct from the ones being developed at the same time by Husserl. Pierce. Whitehead, and others. It has very little to do with the belief, persistent throughout most o f the twentieth century, in a division between schools o f philosophy according to which Analytic Philosophv was opposed to the views of Meinong and Husserl, and according to which certain figures including Wittgenstein were included in. and others including Meinong and Husserl were excluded from, the circle o f A nalytic Philosophy. Finally, it has little to do with the specific issues facing Analvtic Philosophy today, insofar as we might suppose that Analytic Philosophv's arrival at its present state was somehow influenced by metaphilosophical beliefs capable o f explaining the traditionally accepted divisions just mentioned. Over against definitions like Monk's. I suggest that we abandon the quest for a definition in terms o f points o f philosophical unity which might provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being an Analytic philosopher, and instead look for general and fundamental points o f unity which might explain the phenomena that we are in fact interested in when we talk about Analytic Philosophy. And here the issue o f science and the various responses o f philosophy to it suggests itself. It may at first seem odd to begin our look at the origin o f Analytic Philosophv w ith the rise o f modern science. However, in the first half o f the twentieth centurv. science's impact on philosophv was not infrequently addressed (mainlv b> those outside the mainstream o f the Analvtic movement) as being supremelv relevant to understanding the then-current state o f philosophy.1 1 I believe that what was true for philosophv generally in 1 1 Such philosophical luminaries as Dewey and Husserl devoted whole works to the subject. In his Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920). Dewey characterizes the philosophv o f his day as approximating the Baconian ideal o f a scientific philosophy. Dewey, o f Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 82 this regard is especially true for Analytic Philosophy. I believe that only bv looking at the relationship between science and philosophy from the time o f the scientific revolution onward w ill we be able to see the points o f continuity between pre-Analytic and Analytic Philosophy capable o f explaining w hat needs to be explained. Russell, for one. would seem to agree. In his History of Western Philosophy, he speci I teal 1\ places the origins o f w hat became Analytic Philosophv in the context o f a wider and more general drive toward a scientific philosophy. There, he divides the philosophical world o f the early twentieth centurv into three main factions: the adherents o f classical German philosophv (Kantians and Hegelians), the pragmatists and Bergson, and a group he loosely calls the realists. Although the origins o f the realist movement date back to the last quarter o f the nineteenth century. Russell chooses as a convenient inaugural event for it the revolt against German idealism which began around 1900. Against the idealist background, he says, this realism stood out as a new and revolutionary philosophy. Based on this description, a contemporary reader might think that Russell is using the name "realism" to describe what eventually became known as Analvtic Philosophv. After all, the revolt against German idealism is the very event in which Moore and Russell's move toward Analvtic Philosophv is generally supposed to have begun. This impression would be further supported by Russell's description o f the realists as being "characterized bv analysis as a method and course, thinks this is for the best. Husserl, on the other hand, in The Crisis o f the European Sciences m uf Transcendental Phenomenology (1970) characterizes the dominant philosophv o f that time as hav ing been "beheaded" by positiv ism. By this, he meant that positivism prevented philosophy from investigating its own foundations, the conditions o f its own possibility and o f the possibility o f knowledge in general: thus, what traditionally had been the "head" o f philosophical inquiry had been remov ed. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pluralism as a metaplnsic" (ibid. p. 267). However. Russell has in mind a much broader movement than the one that is ordinarily designated by the name Analvtic Philosophy. Among the realists. Russell counts James. Prege. Husserl. Meinong. Moore, himself. Couturat. and the American New Realists. The primary unifying characteristic o f what Russell called "the new philosophy" o f the realists was "that it abandons the claim to a special philosophical method or a peculiar brand o f knowledge to be obtained by its means": It regards philosophy as essentially one with science, differing from the special sciences merely by the generality o f its problems, and by the fact that it is concerned with the formation o f hypotheses where empirical evidence is still lacking. It conceives that all knowledge is scientific knowledge, to be ascertained and proved by the methods o f science. (Russell 1945. p. 268) I he view "that all knowledge is scientific knowledge, to be ascertained and proved In the methods o f science" is what I call scientism. The aim o f this chapter is to demonstrate that Analytic Philosophv was indeed, as Russell's analysis o f the main trends o f early twentieth century philosophy suggests, a species o f the genus philosaphicus scientificus. and one which took a decidedly scientistic view o f know ledge. 4.2 The .Yen Ionian Breakthrough W ilfred Sellars once remarked that "the most d ifficu lt task o f philosophv has always been to define itself in meaningful ways" (Sellars 1974. p. 4). D ifficu lt as self Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 84 definition always may have been, it had become even more difficult by the turn o f the twentieth century, when, in addition to being philosophy 's most difficult task, it became its most pressing task as w ell. The new exigency and increased difficulty attaching to self- definition were precipitated by the rise o f the modem sciences in general, and the emergence o f em pirical psychology in particular. It is beyond the scope o f the present project to give a detailed account o f the history o f modern science as it relates to philosophy: and. besides, such accounts are already available in abundance (e.g.. Rurtt 1932. Carre 1949. Copleston 1963. Dewey 1920. Husserl 1970. Proselt 1964. Whitehead 1927). My aim in this chapter is simply to draw attention to some o f the main ways in which the impact o f science on philosophy set the stage for the emergence o f Analytic Philosophy. A large part o f the story o f philosophy , especially Anglo philosophy, from the late medieval period on. is the story o f the development and influence o f the experimental method o f knowledge which eventually became the distinguishing mark o f modem science. By the close o f the seventeenth century, the experimental method o f knowledge had achieved no small success in "explaining" the phenomena o f the natural world. At that time, the progression o f scientific thought which began with the viu moi/crna o f the late medieval period and continued in the work o f the natural philosophers o f the early renaissance period and then o f Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe and Kepler, came to a sort o f culmination in the w ork o f New ton. With Newton's Principia, we have for the first time in the history o f science a breakthrough that is not only intellectual but cultural. The saga o f modern science's struggle to gain legitimacy under the oppressive rule o f tradition (institutionalized in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. form o f the Catholic Church) is well-known. Though there were m ain significant intellectual achievements prior to Newton, the modern "scientists" and their discoveries remained outside the circles o f societal approval. This all changed with Newton. It has heen said that respect for Newton among his contemporaries approached veneration, that he had the status o f demi-god. and that he was regarded as the authoritative interpreter o f reality for his generation and many generations to come (cf. Burtt 1932. pp. 202 f.. Prosch 1964. pp. 61 & 68). The awe with which his contemporaries, near-contemporaries, and e\en later generations regarded Newton and his work is intimated by the fact that he was celebrated in verse, and a fo rtio ri by the content o f that verse. Take, for example, the lines pro\ idcd by Sir Edmund Hailey as a preface to the Principia: Then ye who now on heavenly nectar fare. Come celebrate with me in song the name OfSewton. to the Muses dear; fo r he Unlocked the hidden treasuries o f Truth: So richly through his m ind had Phoebus cast The radiance o f his own divinity. Xearer to the gods no m ortal may approach <)r. take Alexander Pope's epigram: Suture, and Sature s laws lay hid in Sight. God said. Let New ton be! and a ll was light. These praises seem embarrassingly extravagant, but they pale in comparison to those given in James Thomson's “ Poem Sacred to the Memory o f Sir Isaac N ewton." Thomson alternatively portrays Newton as a philosophic sun. rising and shedding its light on the world, driving away the shadowy visions o f the schools, as a vessel o f God’s own comprehending light, the embodiment o f perfect wisdom, and as a quasi-divine being Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 86 himself, binding the heavenly bodies in their courses. He goes on to say that the Pyramids and other grand edifices, when compared with Newton's achievement, stand as memorials not o f great human achievements but o f wasted time. Thus, the descriptions o f Newton being treated as a demi-god. etc.. are hardly exaggerations. Such a marvelous figure as Newton could not avoid having far-reaching effects on society at large. E.A. Burtt notes that "Newton enjoys the remarkable distinction o f having become an authority paralleled only by Aristotle to an age characterized through and through by rebellion against authority" (Butt 1932. pp. 201 f.). Indeed, as Prosch notes. The general attitude among [Newton's contemporaries and the immediately succeeding generations) seem to be that the great man had broken the ground, that he had in fact shown us where and how the foundations o f heaven and earth were laid. Those w ho were to come after him. it was felt, had now only to follow faithfully the method by which he had succeeded so well in uncovering these foundations. Their tasks were understood simply to consist in building upon these foundations, o f filling out the picture, spinning out the consequences, and going on to the analysis o f other natural forces than those o f inertia and gravitation, as he had adv ised— and in the way that he had advised. (Prosch 1964. p. 6X) So. Newton's work was received as containing a mandate for future generations to continue to pursue knowledge w ithin the methodological and substantive constraints imbedded in it. What were these constraints? 4.3 The Scientistic Drive in Modern Thought I. Bernard Cohen has observed that the Copernican revolution was not complete until Newton provided a physics that explained how the mov ing parts o f the Copernican solar system fit together (Cohen I960). But the Newtonian breakthrough was not just a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. triumph for the Copernican model o f the universe. Insofar as people began to adopt the attitude that they "had ... only to follow faithfully the method by which [Newton) had succeeded." it was a triumph for the experimental method o f knowledge. Like the Copernican theory, the experimental method o f knowledge had been developing for main vears before it reached a moment o f intellectual and cultural culmination in Newton. Prosch comments: other scientists had used this method before Newton ... yet the success and widespread acceptance o f Newtonian physics focused men's attention upon his method to a degree incomparable w ith the extent of attention it had ever won from men before. ... as time went on more and more men everywhere came at length to suppose this 'scien tific' or 'experimental' method to be the method o f acquiring know ledge— so much so that the conv iction became stronger and stronger that what could not be known bv the use o f this method was not a fit subject for knowledge at all. (Prosch l% 4 . pp. 67 f. & 77) Insofar as the Newtonian breakthrough produced the general impression that scientific method was the only sure method for acquiring and ascertaining knowledge, it produced a drive toward scientism. In order to better understand the constraints placed upon knowledge under scientism, we must look briefly at some notable features o f the scientific method. Scientific method, as the experimental method o f knowledge came to be called, is often described in terms o f its three main steps: observation/collection o f data, the framing o f an hypothesis, and experimentation to observationally confirm the hvpothesis. This description draws attention to the main pragmatic features o f the method, but it leav es unmentioned the important theoretical features that attach to it. firs t, insofar as both the original data upon which scientific hypotheses are based and the confirmatory elements o f experimentation must be given in sense experience (and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 88 conn tin ” the use o f various technologies— e.g.. telescope, microscope, photometer, etc.— as an extension o f our senses), the method presupposes the legitimacy o f em pirical data as a basis for knowledge. It does not o f itself require empiricism (understood as the view that sense-experience is the only foundation for knowledge): but. since it is applicable only to em pirically given phenomena, if one were to adopt a full-blown scientism, one would be committed to a species of empiricism. H istorically, the scientific method has had a close association w ith empiricism, as both have their roots in the empirical tendencies o f late medieval nominalism , in the Ockhamite view that all knowledge is grounded in the direct apprehension or immediate experience o f real things, and that all real things are particular and indiv isible. Second, scientific method has always inv olved the use o f mathematics to describe the relationships between objects: and. since Galileo, the use o f the mathematical- experimental (a.k.a. hypothetico-deductive) method in science has assumed the outright mathematization o f nature (cf. Burtt 1932. pp. 64-73: Husserl 1970. pp. 23 ff.). This requires that we regard the objects o f science as quantifiable, and the relations among these objects as mathematically determinable by the use o f a blind, calculatioual technique. It also requires that we adopt an analvtic method. In order to quantify. we must pick out from the host o f features found in real objects those supposedly atomic features that w ill correspond to mathematical units. This, o f course, requires that we analyze objects, that we consider them as broken down into their ultimate constituents— their properties. Onlv hav ing done so can we isolate the quantifiable properties relevant to the phenomenon in which we are interested. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8l) Tlie combination o f mathematical and empirical principles in scientific method is one o f a number o f uneasy partnerships latent in scientific practice. It is an uneasy partnership for two reasons. First, ironically, it was lack o f faith in human powers o f empirical observation that drove G alileo to the mathematical method. In the background was the philosophical skepticism that eventually drove Descartes to seek a new foundation and a new "geometrical" method for knowledge; in the foreground were Galileo's telescopic observations which served to undermine observation-based Aristotelian views concerning heavenly bodies. In this context, some, like Descartes and Galileo, tried to emulate in their fields o f interest certain aspects o f mathematical procedure, therebv appropriating for their topics some o f the objectivity and necessity o f mathematical knowledge. Second, the objective and necessary nature o f mathematical knowledge traditionally has been thought to rely on non-empirical factors. Primu facie at least, numbers are not empirical, number concepts do not arise from sensorv experience, and we do not become aware o f the necessary relations between numbers via induction from particular instances. Moreover, as far as I am aware, there exists no reallv satisfactory empirical theory o f mathematics. Thus, since they seem to resist empirical explanation, these prim a facie features of mathematics seem to be more than merely apparent. I low ev er, these issues being pushed aside by the practical concents o f the early scientists, the mathematization o f nature and the mathematical component o f the scientific method were accepted as providing not only a greater measure o f objectivity, but an unparalleled degree o f precision. As a result, scientific method is restricted in its application to those features of experience which are empirically accessible (in principle, a least) and quantifiable, and to those seemingly invariable relations which seem to be grounded in. or at least correlated Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. with, the quantifiable features o f things, and which thus can be mathematically idealized in terms o f equations expressing physical "laws." Under scientism, all knowledge is thus restricted. Additionally, there are some features o f Newton's use o f the method which do not derive from the requirements o f the method itself, but which nonetheless have colored the modern drive toward scientism, and have imposed additional restrictions on knowledge, first, the traditional aim o f scientists in their use o f the method has been to establish objective knowledge about the world as it really is— hence the designation scientific realism. Ill is is not to say. o f cours^. that all scientists are realists. It is just to say that realistic knowledge was the end for which the method was initiall\ developed. I lie fact that it has since become clear that scientific inquiry is compatible with anti-realism does not diminish the fact that, at a time when skepticism about the senses and about knowledge in general began to plague philosophers, the objective realism o f classical philosophv surv ived in the early scientists. fhe combination o f realism and modem empiricism in scientific method creates another o f those uneasy partnerships w hich is apparent from a theoretical (as opposed to a practical) standpoint. Like all the main modern epistemologies. modern empiricism has tended toward representationalism. and representationalism calls into question the traditional realism o f science. Again, this is something which, in the pursuit o f their practical concerns, scientists did not worry over. Second, we may note Newton's negative attitude toward speculative hypotheses. Prosch remarks that “ Newton him self inveighed against the use o f hypotheses. declaring disdainfully. 'I do not frame Inpotheses.' ... he seemed to insist that all that was necessary Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 91 was to compile vast quantities o f data and allow the laws o f nature to stand forth from the data, presumably as observable correlations" (Prosch 1964. p. 73). Bacon had expressed the same attitude over a half-century earlier, and it seems to have been ty pical o f the scientific mind during the late 1600s. O f course, the early scientists had to frame hypotheses: but they wanted— indeed, needed— to distinguish their hypothesizing, which they felt was firm ly grounded in empirical data, from the more speculative hypothesizing ot the schoolmen and earlier philosophers, little o f which had any observational basis or any observable consequences whereby they m ight be experimentally tested. We may get a clearer idea o f what was meant by "hy pothesis" in this pejorative sense by considering the following statement from Newton’s Principia'. Whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis: and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether o f occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy, particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction, (quoted in Burtt 1932. p. 214) An example o f an hy pothesis in this sense can be found in the third o f Descartes' Meditations, in the proposal that there might be an evil genius deceiv ing him : "because I have no reason for thinking that there is a God who is a deceiver, the basis for doubting, depending as it does upon the above hypothesis [i.e.. that an evil genius exists), is very tenuous and. so to speak, metaphysical" (Descartes 1641. p. 71).'- The hypothesis o f the Thus reads the Cress translation. In the original Latin version. Descartes uses opinio. which can mean opinion, supposition, conjecture, belief, and the like. In D uLac’s French translation, opinio is rendered opinion, while the Veitch translation renders it supposition. Though these versions differ in word, they are roughly the same in spirit. What Descartes here means by opinio is sufficiently similar to what was meant by Newton and others by hypothesis in the pejorative sense, and each o f these translations adequately captures that. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. c >: evil genius was neither deduced nor inferred from any phenomena. It is introduced in the tirst Meditation as an ad hoc device to provide a condition under which it would he reasonable to doubt mathematical knowledge: but Descartes never introduces a positive reason to believe it is the case. It is a merely possible scenario spun out o f imagination. On account o f his eschewing such hypotheses, Thomson could describe Newton, in opposition to the schoolmen, as an All-piercing sag e' who sat not down and dream it Romantic schemes, defended h\ the din Of specious words, and tyranny of names: But. bidding his amazing mind attend. And with heroic patience years on years Deep-searching, saw at last the system dawn. And shine, o f a ll his race, on him alone. Not all hypotheses were as w ild as the one concerning an e \il genius: even so. Newton took a stand against both such metaphysical hypotheses and against physical hypotheses as well. An example o f a physical hypothesis in the pejorative sense can be drawn from Newton's own work. In point o f fact. Newton did frame hypotheses, though he took this to be an activ ity separate from his scientific philosophizing, and he was always careful to distinguish between his hypotheses. 011 the one hand, and what he had established via his method, on the other. One such hypothesis was Newton's suggestion that light is corporeal. This is clearly introduced as a mere suggestion, a plausible way o f accounting for the phenomena— not as the only plausible way. and certainly not as something deduced from the observable phenomena associated with light. Nonetheless, it was seized upon as a matter for debate by Newton's contemporaries. In defending him self against an attack by Hooke, Newton wrote: "It is true, that from my theory I argue the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. corporeality o f light, but I do it without any absolute positiveness, as the word perhaps intimates, and make at most a very plausible consequence o f the doctrine, and not a fundamental supposition..." (quoted in Burtt 1932. pp. 212 f.). Burtt notes that, unable to keep his contemporaries m indful o f the rigorous distinction lie maintained between experimental laws, which were positively demonstrable, and hypotheses, which were not. Newton eventually “ felt him self forced to the conviction that the only safe method was to ban hypotheses entirely from experimental philosophy, confining him self rigorously to the discovered and exactly verifiable properties and laws alone" (Burtt 1932. p. 213). In this, we see the seeds o f what would later come to be called positivism.' Closely connected to this, we may note that, third. Newton seems to have believed that the process by which hypotheses could shed their merely hypothetical character and become pieces o f genuine knowledge involved their expression in mathematical terms. Hypotheses involving qualitative concepts, expressed in ordinary language, were inadequate. This is demonstrated by Newton's refusal to credit Hooke's contribution to the theory ol gravitation. In the late 1870s. Robert Hooke began to correspond with Newton about the problem o f celestial motion. In the course o f their correspondence. Hooke suggested to Newton that the curv ilinear motion o f planetary orbits might be analyzed into a tangential motion and what Newton later came to call a centripetal motion. When Newton later introduced his inverse-square law o f gravity (which expressed mathematically the relationship between two such motions). Hooke insisted that Newton credit him for having originally conceived the theory o f grav itation expressed by the law. '' Not to be confused with the school o f Positiv ism (note the distinction between lovver-and upper-case ” p") founded by Comte, / ’ositivism as a school embodied in a formal way Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ‘>4 New ion responded to Hooke's claims by saving: "Now is not this \erv tine? Mathematicians that find out, settle, and do all the business must content themselves with being nothing but dry calculators and drudges: and another, that does nothing but pretend and grasp at all things, must carry away all the invention..." (quoted in Cohen I960, p. 150). Huis Newton refused to credit Hooke, apparently on the grounds that Hooke's hypothesis, involving as it did only ordinary concepts, and expressed as it was in ordinary terms, failed to attain the status o f knowledge. Hooke was one who "sat down and dream d Romantic schemes." His theory was a guess, a mere hypothesis. Newton, however, in working out the precise mathematical relationship between the motions Hooke had suggested, had alone discovered something worthy o f being called knowledge. As adamant as he was about the mathematical nature o f knowledge, there are reasons lor thinking that Newton took empirical observation to be even more fundamental to knowledge than mathematical formulation. li.A . Burtt maintains that empirical observation was. for Newton, the ultimate criterion for knowledge, noting that: Continually he called in experimental verification, even for the solution o f questions whose answers would seem to be involved in the very meanings o f his terms, such as the proportionality o f resistance to density. Having defined mass in terms o f density and also in terms o f resistance, such proportionality would seem to be involved in the very meanings o f the words. In the Universal Arithmetic, he even intimates that some problems cannot be properly translated into the mathematical language at all. a hideous heresy to Galileo or Descartes. It is not too much to say that for Newton mathematics was solely a method for the solution o f problems posed by sensible experience. (Burtt 1932, pp. 209 f.) finis we find a very strong empiricism alongside Newton's '"mathematicism." In order to views which were broadly shared by many figures and groups less form ally, and which can be called />ositiv istic. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 95 have knowledge, we must have an equation expressing mathematically the relationship between sense perceptible phenomena. We may detect in all this yet another Baconian ideal. Possibly the best known feature o f Bacon's view-s is expressed in the maxim knowledge i.s power. I f the only knowledge worth having is knowledge that gives us power to control nature, or at least to pre\ent it from catching us o ff guard, then the only hypotheses worth having are mathematical hypotheses which specify precisely the relationships between \arious phenomena in such a way that we can achieve some measure o f predictive knowledge. One final aspect o f Newton's work which would turn out to be important in the scientific ideal o f modern thought is its cumulative nature. It is often pointed out that Newton was as much a great synthesizer as he was a great innovator. To a great degree. Newton's successes were made possible by the fact that he did not have to build his theory from the ground up. He began with many foundational elements alread) in place, e.g.. tialileo's insights in the direction o f an inertial physics, and Kepler’s theory o f elliptical planetary orbits. The fact that he was able to build on his predecessors' diseo\cries rather than having to begin afresh is expressed in Newton's famous line " I f I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders o f giants." This enabled a kind o f progress unprecedented in human thought. These features o f Newton's approach to know ledge came to figure prominently in the modern conception o f scientific knowledge, so that the drive toward scientism in modern times can be understood as a drive largely toward knowledge characterizable in terms o f these features. To sum them up. the main general requirements for knowledge in the era o f post-Newtonian scientism are, with regard to the objects o f know ledge, that they Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 96 should be ( I ) sense perceptible. (2) quantifiable, and thus (3) reducible to atoms which would serve as correlates o f mathematical units, and (4) calculationally determinable: with regard to method, that it should ( I) be grounded in careful, empirical observation, and (2) exhibit mathematical precision and certainty, and thus (3) that it should involve a calculational technique, and (4) that it should be analytic, discovering the basic realities or atoms which w ill correspond to calculational units: and with regard to pieces o f knowledge, what we might call truths, that they should be ( I) observationall> verifiable. (2) mathematically expressed. (3) that they should have some practical, preferably predictive, use. and (4) that they should be o f a kind that could be built upon In later thinkers, and thus form part o f a cumulativ e body o f know ledge. In the scientistic drive o f post-Newtonian thought, these features became not exactly requirements for knowledge, but ideals for know ledge, so that any bit o f purported knowledge, the method by which it was acquired, and the object(s) about which it claimed to be. had to at least approximate a great main, if not all. o f these ideal features in order to be taken seriously Concomitant w ith the drive toward scientism, and in fact generated by it. there was a drive toward a materialistic and mechanistic weltunschauung. By restricting knowledge to what is em pirically given, quantifiable, and mathematically determinable, the realm o f the know able was restricted to the universe on the so-called "billiard ball" model: the notion that basically everything ... was made up o f small, solid particles, in themselves inert, but always in motion and elastically rebounding from each other, bound together by the laws o f motion and gravitational force (and possibly by other forces not yet as fully understood), and operating mechanically. (Prosch 1964. p. 65) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 07 I his was not. tor Newton, a complete Weltanschauung. Seeing that there was no place in a mechanical universe for rationality, freedom, purpose, spirit. God. etc.. Newton adopted a dualistic w orldview . In this way he salvaged the existence o f such things, but he could not salv age them as objects o f know ledge. By remov ing such things from the realm o f the know able. Newton inadvertently laid the groundwork for their neglect and. ultimately, their rejection as existents. "W hereof we cannot speak, we must be silent." and whereof we are silent, we tend to be unmindful: hence. post-Newtonian culture has tended to let go the 'spiritual' side o f Newton’s Weltanschauung. and to treat the billiard-ball model o f the physical universe as a Weltanschauung— i.e.. as a general description o f the entire universe. 4.4 'I he Effects o j Scientism on Other Fields o f Knowledge In saying that there have been, in modern and especially in post-Newtonian thought, drives toward scientism and toward a materialistic and mechanistic Weltanschauung. I do not mean to suggest that scientism and materialism were explicitly embraced widely and often as theories providing philosophical first-principles, though there are certainly cases in which they were thus embraced. Considered as general cultural phenomena, these drives seem to have been more the accidental consequence o f a simple desire to apply scientific method to an ever-increasing range o f phenomena. This desire was sparked by a number o f factors, not least among them the prestige o f appearing Newtonian. And. o f course, the scientific method did begin, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to yield impressive results in fields other than physics, most notably in medicine and its related disciplines (e.g.. biology, chemistry, anatomy, etc.). In these Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Helds, knowledge was acquired whereby various sorts o f suffering were eliminated or dim inished, and whereby the quality o f human life was greatl> improved. This added to the prestige o f the method, and further excited the desire to continue applying it in new fields. W ith a great deal o f human attention thus directed, the possibility o f using other methods to acquire know ledge and the need for a philosophical grounding o f the scientific method itself were increasingly ignored. Notwithstanding attempts, like Descartes", to suggest that the empirical sciences needed a firm philosophical grounding, and attempts, like Hume's, to show that there were disturbing epistemic problems latent in scientific method (especially with regard to its reliance upon sense-perception. causal relations, and induction). Western culture at large was swept away in the direction o f the scientific method under a haze o f gleeful naivete: hence, the drive toward scientism. And. insofar as the scientific method seemed to require it. an ever-increasing range o f phenomena was treated as empirical, quantifiable, and mathematically determinable: hence the drive toward mechanistic materialism. In the wake o f these drives, there was a radical refashioning o f nearly all putative fields of knowledge. In order to gain or retain respectability and to be regarded as fruitful, a field had to approximate Newtonian physics rather closely in terms o f its method and the type o f knowledge it generated. This required that the subject matter be viewed a certain w ay : fo llo w in g the lead o f the great man [Newton |, attempts to make a science o f a subject became identical with attempts to give a mechanical explanation o f its appearances. ... this soon came to mean simply the attempt to find the 'atoms' o f the subject. .. the forces operative upon these, and the 'law s’ in accordance with which these forces moved these units.... (Prosch 1964. p. 66) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. w Not only were the natural sciences refashioned along these lines, but attempts were made to refashion the human sciences, what Dilthev called geisteswissenschafien. in like manner. Dilthey's place in the debate over the refashioning o f the human sciences is doubly illustrative o f the scientistic drive in modern thought. His project in his Introduction to the Hitman Sciences (D ilthev 1883) was to carve out a middle ground between what had become, by the late 1800s. the two main alternative view s o f the human sciences. One w as the positivistic view o f Comte, M ill. Buckle, etc.. that human sciences should be modeled on the natural sciences. The other was the view o f traditional philosophy, that the human sciences depended upon metaphysical first principles. Dilthev identifies Lotze as a representative o f this view . Dilthey 's project was to make the human sciences scientific, not in the positivistic sense, but in such a way that they would be empirically-grounded and not subservient to a system o f metaphy sics. Thus, it illustrates the scientistic drive both in that it acknowledges the existence o f the strong positivistic tendency that had arisen after Newton, and in that, though he ultimately opposed it. Dilthey him self agreed with positivism insofar as he was not content with the traditional view, and thought the human sciences needed to be refashioned in a more scientific direction.1 4 4.5 The Effects o f Scientism on Philosophy One illum inating way to categorize philosophers from the modern era onward is to group them according to their responses to the scientistic drive. Three very general types o f response can be identified. First, there have been those who have refused to accept the " For more on the effects o f science on the humanities, see Berlin 1997a-b. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 100 scientistic drive. Here we include, e.g., the Continental rationalists. Kant and post-Kantian transcendentalists in Europe and Britain such as Schopenhauer. Fichte. T.H. Green and F.H. Bradley. Husserl, the Existentialists, and mainstream contemporary Continental philosophers such as Gadamer and Derrida. W hile there are obvious and important differences among the approaches to philosophy attached to these figures and schools (especially along rationalist/irrationalist lines), they all agree that science is not an intellectually self-sufficient enterprise, and. arguably , that the kind o f knowledge acquired by the methods o f empirical science is not the ultimate form o f human know ledge. In point o f historical fact, this type o f reaction was the first to arise. Almost in anticipation o f the Newtonian breakthrough and the scientistic drive it would produce, it arose in the work o f the Continental Rationalists. While they were in no way opposed to science, the Continental Rationalists opposed the scientistic tendency insofar as they maintained that science— and indeed know ledge itself— required a reason-based grounding in a system o f a priori metaphysics. In this respect, they were very much in line with traditional philosophy. I have suggested that traditional philosophy was mainly interested in developing a v iew o f the world at the most general level through the use o f reason. Traditional philosophy was out o f sync w ith the modern scientistic drive in a number of respects. Because it was supposed to deal with the most general types and truths, and because these were supposed to serve as first-principles w ithin the order o f knowledge, traditional philosophy was supposed to have the final say in the realm o f knowledge. However, this conception o f philosophy brought it into competition w ith science under the scientistic worldview: for, according to scientism, science is supposed to hav e the final say in matters o f knowledge. Additionally , according to scientism, empirical Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 101 observation is the proper method tor acquiring know ledge, whereas for traditional philosophy, it is a priori reasoning. Given these fundamental points o f disagreement, there w as simply no way that any response embodying these traditional views could have survived against the scientific drive. Second, there have been those who have embraced the scientistic drive completely. Here we include, e.g.. many o f the philosophes o f the French Enlightenment (cf. Capaldi 2000. pp. 17 ft'.). Comte and the Positivists. In order to fully succumb to the scientistic drive, a philosophy must have no objection to it: and in order to have no objection to it. it must accept that the human being is such that it can know only by scientific means, that the world is such that it can be known only by such means, and so on. Thus, this response, which we may call in general the positivistic response, is philosophical insofar as it seems to be grounded in a purportedly reason-based Weltanschauung. However, the positivistic view also can be characterized somewhat paradoxically as an anti-philosophical philosophy1 , since the positivistic Weltanschauung has no place for philosophy as a field o f know ledge."’ '' For an interesting discussion o f anti-philosophy philosophy, see Couture and Nielsen I 993. pp. 3 f. note 2. " It is true that, on the Comtean view, philosophy is not totally eliminated from the range o f human intellectual endeavors. It remains as the discipline responsible for relating the special sciences one to another. As such, it is not on the front-lines o f know ledge, so to speak. It does not actually discover new truths, but may only perform its ordering and relating function upon truths already established by the sciences. It has no original subject matter o f its own. but inherits it second-hand from the sciences. As such, it is less a field o f know ledge, more o f a clerical aid to the sciences. From the point o f view of/?ositivism . purely considered, there really is no place for philosophy, or any intellectual endeav or that lacks a range o f phenomena about which it can create inductive generalizations, positiv istic "law s." Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 102 Third, there have been those who. acquiescing in general to the scientistic drive, have attempted to turn philosophy into a kind o f science. Instead o f taking it to completely rule out philosophy as a legitimate human endeavor, the positivistic Weltanschauung can be seen as presenting philosophy with an option: it must either function as a science or admit that it has nothing to do with know ledge. This response is o f primary importance when it comes to linking the effects o f scientism to the linguistic turn and the rise o f Analytic Philosophy. It was the preferred option in Britain, among both the Scottish school which has come to be known, somewhat wrongly, as the Common Sense school, and the school o f British Empiricism. British Empiricism and the Scottish school o f Carmichael. Hutcheson. Reid. Stewart, etc.. are often thought o f as rivals, and rightly so— but their adversarial relationship depends upon disagreements over relatively specific issues. At a more general level, there are a number o f important respects in which the two are more allies than enemies. The prevailing general tendency in both schools was to yield in a general way to the scientistic sentiment, and to try to carry on in an attitude o f deference to science by making philosophy some sort o f subordinate science. This is apparent from two slightly more specific tendencies within the common British tradition. First, insofar as the new sciences were increasingly regarded as prov iding adequate analy ses o f the constituents o f the natural world and their relations. British philosophy was compelled to surrender much o f philosophy's traditional subject matter. It was widely felt that there was no longer any need for a speculative, philosophical Weltanschauung', for the scientific Weltanschauung provided all we needed to know about the world. In response. British philosophy limited its scope m ainly to problems o f psychology , like perception and thought. Second, insofar Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 103 as scientific method had become a cultural ideal for knowledge, the empirical philosophy tried to approximate the method in their study o f psychological issues. C'arre speaks o f Anglo philosophy at this time thus: ln\estimations into first principles assumed the mathematical and experimental view o f things as im plicitly as the older investigations had assumed the Aristotelian and theological views. Philosophical thought became imbued with the logic o f scientific activity, w ith the search for elementary data and mechanical laws. (Carre 1949. p. 226) these are familiar features o f British Empiricism. The attitude o f deference to science is obvious in Locke, who explicitly portrays himself as laboring in the shadow of "the incomparable Mr. Newton” and other "master-builders" in the "commonwealth o f learning." and who explicitly sets him self and his philosophy in the role o f "an under labourer ... clearing the ground a little, and removing some o f the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge" (Locke 1975. pp. 9 f.). Locke's attempt to develop an empirical philosophy. Hume's attempt to develop a "science o f man" on the basis o f empirical philosophy. Bentham's attempt at developing a moral science. M ill's attempt to make logic into an inductive science, the many attempts among these and other philosophers to delineate a set o f mental "layvs o f association." and so on, all can (and. 1 believe, should) be understood as attempts to make philosophy more scientific. In general, the subject matter o f the Empirical philosophy , the objects of its purported knovy ledge, consisted in atomic moments o f experience, variously called perceptions, sensations, ideas, impressions, etc. These yvere thought to be empirically accessible, if not exactly sense- perceptible (though they might be considered sense-perceptible in a broad sense— the issue here is yyhat counts as a sense). This alloyved the British Empiricists to use an analytic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. [04 method involving careful, empirical observation. Perceptions were not. however, quantifiable— at least not in any obv ious wav: thus they could not serve well as correlates ol mathematical units. As a result, they were not calculationallv determinable, and neither the method nor the knowledge it produced could not be mathematically precise. It was still possible, though, that the relations between sensations might be regular enough to establish a set ot non-mathematical laws. Thus, there was hope that Empiricism might yield observationally verifiable truths that, though not mathematically expressible, would have a practical, possibly even a predictive, use. I he suggestion that the Scottish school ol" Common Sense arose out o f basically the same motivation as British Empiricism, and that the general characteristics mentioned above were as much a part o f the former as they were the latter, may be surprising to the contemporary Analytic philosopher. Often, the Scottish school is presented as hav ing arisen in response to Hume, and as hav ing its substance or raison d 'etre in the defense o f what is commonly presented as its main argument against Hume: the observation that his conclusions were just too absurd to be believed.1 This is not the case, however, ("or one thing, a distinctive. Scottish approach to philosophy, seeking to approximate science in various respects, existed prior to the publication o f Hume's Treatise in 1737. An account o f the history o f this approach is given in John Veitch's two-part study o f philosophy in the Scottish universities (Veitch I877a-b). According to Veitch. the modern spirit was present ' When Hume's treatise finally appeared, more than a full decade after the Scottish school began to develop, the response was not merely this simplistic one. W hile some within the Scottish school did object to him this way— Beattie, for example— this was certainly not the full response o f its m ajor luminaries, like Reid and Stewart. Veitch insists that Reid's major strike against Hume is not the mere insistence that certain things are a matter o f common sense, but an alternative analysis o f experience, produced by the very same Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in Scotland at least as early as 1721. in the philosophy o f Reid's teacher. George Turnbull. Veitch describes Turnbull as among the first to apply to the contents o f consciousness the method o f observation and induction, which had been employed with such brilliant results in the natural sciences. A bjuring abstract metaphysics in word and method, he substituted moral philosophy as the name o f the new line o f inquiry ... To hypothesis and deduction from it. he was especialK a\erse. (Veitch 1877b. p. 212) The modern spirit was also present in the philosophy o f Gerschom Carmichael, who was appointed as the first professor o f moral philosophy at Glasgow in 1727. Carmichael is described as a man "w ell read in the older philosophy, and yet alive to a new power and method o f inquiry ... [recognizing] the new or experimental method o f founding inlerence on the observation of facts" (ibid.. p. 209). "In all departments o f philosophy which he touched." Veitch observes, "there are signs o f the new spirit." Indeed, in 1724 Carmichael published a work in which he tried to "find a ground for human law by a method o f observation and analysis o f the facts and principles of human nature" (ibid.). and in I 729 he published a treatise in which he supported the new experimental method over the deductive method o f Descartes and Clarke. Carmichael was succeeded at Glasgow by his student Francis Hutcheson, who was influenced as much by Locke as by his own teacher. Having decided that the concerns o f the modern spirit could not be properly addressed in Latin scholastic terminology. Hutcheson bears the distinction o f being the first to lecture in English at Glasgow. method o f reflective analy sis that Hume used, in light o f w hich Hume's analy sis is seen to be deficient and erroneous (cf. Veitch 1877b. pp. 220 ff.). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 106 beginning in 1730. The influence o f his scientistic tendencies can be seen in the work o f liis most famous student. Adam Smith. The false belief that the Scottish school arose in response to flum e has engendered the further false belief that its substance consisted in its response to Hume. Veitch points out that Turnbull's analysis o f association alone ought to be enough to dispel "the utter misconception o f those who suppose that the reflective method o f the Scottish thinkers means merely the acceptance o f facts o f experience in their totality and complexity. and does not involve thoroughgoing analysis" (Veitch 1877b. pp. 212 f.). Indeed, the similarity o f interest and approach among the members o f the Scottish school and the British Empiricists is apparent throughout the whole history o f the Scottish school. I have alreadv mentioned the similarity between Locke and Turnbull with regard to their studv o f consciousness, and the influence o f Locke on Hutcheson. Around 1718. the Rankenian C lub was formed in Edinburgh for the purpose o f giving careful studv to the writings o f Berkeley. The formation o f such associations was not uncommon in Scotland: in fact, the growth o f the Scottish school took place to a great extent in the context o f such groups. One o f these was the Philosophical Society o f Aberdeen, founded by Thomas Reid in I 758. According to its constitution, it was to be dedicated to the discussion o f philosophy understood as including every principle o f Science which may be deduced by just and lawful induction from the phenomena either o f the human mind or o f the material world: all observation and experiments that may furnish materials for such induction. The examination o f false schemes o f Philosophy and false methods o f philosophising: the subserviency o f philosophy to arts: the principles they borrow from it, and the means o f carrying them to tiieir perfection, (quoted in Veitch 1877b, p. 215) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 107 ■■This." according to Veitch. "was the explicit statement o f the new method o f philosophy in the country and might be taken as the motto to the whole subsequent works o f Reid" ( ibid.). So. the Scottish school was much more than a response to flume. It originated out ol the same concerns that eventually produced Humean empiricism, and its approach to philosoph) was. in the main and at a general level, parallel to that o f British Empiricism. To a degree, it is possible to view both the Scottish school and Humean empiricism as developments upon Locke's empirical philosophy: at least insofar as both seem to take from Locke the idea that philosophy has primarily to do with the analysis o f the phenomena o f human consciousness. Viewed thus, it is worth wondering why only the I lumean branch is viewed by the majority o f Analytic philosophers as having achieved an\ lasting significance. A large part o f the answer. I think, resides in the fact that, in the attempt to he scientific, the Empirical school simply outdid the Scottish school. On the whole, the Scottish school tended to have fewer qualms about forming speculative hypotheses. In this it deviated from the scientistic tendency. Also, the two schools tended to disagree about the nature o f their subject matter— mental phenomena. Veitch observes that "a ll through the Scottish school and Reid, there is a revulsion from a mechanical or physiological explanation o f m ind ... The general position o f the school [is] that o f a resolute maintenance o f a distinction between physiological and psychological facts" (ibid.. p. 230). On the other band, the Empirical tradition, from Hume and Hartley on through the two M ills and culminating in Bain, tended to be open to such an account: and some, like Hartley and Bain, positively strove for it. As we shall see. this alliance with what ultimately became experimental psychology played a large part in preserving the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 108 significance o f British Empiricism, but also caused it to fail as an attempt to preserve philosophy as a field o f knowledge. 4.6 The Alliance with Psychology, and its Dissolution In the early volumes o f Mind, there appeared a series o f articles describing the recent and present states o f philosophy in the major British universities and in a few select areas outside o f Britain. Henry Sidgwick's contribution (Sidgwick 1876) reveals that Cambridge was very much in the clutches o f the Zeitgeist during the post-Newtonian era. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century "the official recognition o f [metaphysical and moral] studies had dwindled to the merest shadow o f a shade.... Philosophy had. for all practical purposes, lost its old place in the Cambridge scheme o f studies: and a new place had not vet been found for it" (ibid. p 236). Perhaps the things closest to philosophy that went on in that academic setting were discussions o f methodology: but. Sidgw ick notes, a training in mathematics and physics rather than in traditional philosophy was the standard preparation for taking part in such controversies. In fact, mathematics and physics came almost completely to take the place o f philosophy at Cambridge. Sidgwick notes that the peculiarly English use o f "philosophy" as synonymous w ith "physics" had been "especially at home at Cambridge since the time o f N ew ton." From Newton's time until the first decade o f the nineteenth century, the philosophical curriculum at Cambridge consisted only o f Locke and Paley— both "scientific" philosophers. After that, however, interest in philosophy proper seemed to disappear entirely, in favor o f the continually growing interest in mathematics and philosophy-as-physics, on the one hand, and classics on the other. Testing practices at Cambridge reflected the dim inution o f interest in philosophy proper. By around 1830. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. students in mathematics and the sciences were exempted from w riting exams in philosophy: "the traditional papers on 'Locke and Paley' were, for the first time. avowedK constructed for the tio a /.o i only: whose brains not being burdened w ith mathematics were supposed to have room fora modicum o f moral reflection” (ibid.. p. 241). By 1839. thev were abolished entirely. That same sear. Whew el I— a figure more often remembered for his role in the development o f scientific method than for his contributions to other areas o f philosophy— began to lecture on moral philosophy, and thus maintained at least a spark o f traditional philosophizing at Cambridge. However, moral philosophy at Cambridge was. for a long time, to wear what Sidgwick describes as a "badge o f in fe rio rity" as compared with mathematical and classical studies. On the whole. says Sidgwick. the course o f studv at Cambridge generated interest in "hypothetical extensions o f physical explanations" and a preference for "exactness o f method and certainty o f results in comparison with breadth and completeness o f view" (ibid.. p. 245). Traditional philosophy had been mainly concerned with the latter, and had never been quite capable o f achieving the former. It is clear from this portrait o f Cambridge that philosophy as a unique field o f knowledge was struggling for survival. Both in terms o f interest and in terms o f subject matter, there seemed to be little place left for it. The portray al o f philosophy as a discipline without a subject matter o f its own (or at least without an important subject matter o f its own) is reinforced in Mark Pattison’s description o f philosophy at O xford (Pattison 1876). " l or such philosophical teaching as exists among us." Pattison observes, "we must look to the 'school' o f classics.... Philosophy has no substantive existence o f its own. It is an appendage o f our classical training" (Pattison 1876. p. 90) . Pattison's lament has more to do with the lack o f fresh philosophical thought at Oxford than the usurpation o f phiiosophy Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I 10 by classical studies. He seems to have desired for O xford a program o f philosophical training closer in method and subject matter to then-contemporary scientific thinking. Philosophical training at Oxford was not. as it ought to have been, "'intellectual discipline, not training in investigation, in research, in scientific procedure, but in the art o f producing a clever answer to a question on a subject on which you have no real knowledge” (Pattison 1876. p. 89). He attributes the lack o f such a program prim arily to the continuing influence o f Neuman at Oxford, under which philosophical thought had to be subordinated to religious dogma. Since the procedure at Oxford was to believe in order to understand, there was no motivation, and in fact no room, for philosophy to carve out a unique place as a Held o f knowledge in the context o f contemporary thought. Insofar as this is his complaint. Pattison exemplifies the scientistic spirit o f the age.ls Almost unanimously in this series o f articles, the standing o f philosophy is linked to the freedom it was given, in this or that institution, to keep pace with the scientistic d ri\e o f modern thought without dissolving into science, as it seems nearly to have done at Cambridge. In those universities where philosophy was reported to be comparatively alive and well, this happy state was thought to be due to the permission o f progressive philosophical thought. John Veitch (Veitch 1877a-b). for example, attributes much o f the vitality o f philosophy in Scotland (in the form o f the Scottish school) to the transition in the universities from the old system o f regents to the new sy stem o f professors. Cnder the regenting system, education was mainly an introduction to a list o f approved books. W hile ls Another respect in which Pattison exemplifies the scientistic spirit is in his decision to ignore British Idealism in his article. W.R. Sorely was later to marvel at Pattison's negative assessment o f philosophy at this time precisely for this reason (cf. note 19). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. this method provided an excellent classical education. Veitch insists that it was not successful as a method o f philosophical instruction: Its tendency is to make little demand either on the research or the power o f active thought o f the teacher, and thus to repress originality. However much it may conduce to accuracy in the master) o f the books, it is not likely to promote the habit of original speculation either in master or pupil, or to lead to progress in philosophical science... its defect as a system o f thought was that it had gone chiefly in one groove o f study— a circle without forward progress. Advance o f theory upon theory there was none.... (ibid.. pp. 83 & 91) Clearly, the ideals o f w hich the regenting system fell short— progressive, original thinking, building upon the findings o f earlier theorists, and so on— were taken from modern science, furtherm ore, these are just the same deficiencies that Pattison felt were present in Oxford's philosophical curriculum: and indeed. Veitch points out that the tutorial systems o f Oxford and Cambridge were, at that time, very much like the antiquated regenting system o f the medieval Scottish universities. By the m iddle o f the eighteenth-century, the regenting system had given way to the professoriate in Scotland. This system was found to be much more conducive to philosophizing in the modern spirit. W hereas the regent was a jack o f many trades, instructing students in many different subjects a one time, the professor was a specialist in one field, and thus could give to it the kind of careful attention that was necessary in science. The professor was not required to teach anv specific list o f books, but could develop his own approach to the subject matter, even to the point o f breaking new ground in his lectures rather than using them to introduce students to already established ideas. On the whole, the professoriate created a "freer spirit o f research and independent thought" in the Scottish universities: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. since the institution o f the Professoriate, upwards o f one hundred and fifty tears ago. there has arisen... in Scotland, and most o f all in the universities, a course o f independent philosophical thought— continuous, yet with a common character and tendency— so marked as to entitle it to the name o f a school, and to make it influential in other countries, as. for example, in France and the United States o f America. In this particular, the contrast betw een the comparative barrenness o f the three hundred years o f the system o f Regenting and the productiveness o f the Professoriate does not adm it o f dispute.... (ibid.. p. 84) Another point o f near unanimity is that the required reading o f Locke seems to lta\e been the mark o f a modern curriculum. As we have seen. Locke had been one o f the two pillars o f philosophical education at Cambridge since the time o f Newton. In the Scottish universities. Locke was o fficia lly introduced into University teaching around I 730. but he had been an indirect influence for some time prior. W .II.S. M onck's report on the University o f D ublin records that Locke's Essay was studied there at least informally immediately upon its publication, and that it was very soon after introduced into the formal curriculum. O w ing to this early acceptance o f Locke, Dublin became the home o f "an intellectual movement mainly directed towards philosophy which had then no parallel in the British Islands" (M onck 1876. p. 384). That the general interest o f this intellectual movement was in the direction o f Locke is suggested by the fact that Berkeley emerged as its greatest luminary. In general, it seems to have been the case that, in the post-Newtonian era. the continuing v itality o f philosophy in Britain depended largely upon its being able to keep pace with modern science roughly in the way recommended by Locke, i.e.. bv turning philosophy into a sort o f psychological studv. a "mental science." O f the three general responses to the scientistic driv e I hav e mentioned, only the third stood a chance o f preserv ing philosophy as a field o f knowledge— the traditionalism o f the first response could not stand Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. against the rising tide o f scientism, and the positivism o f the third response requires the demise o f philosophy as a field o f knowledge. The problem for those who were inclined to respond to the scientistic drive in this way was to formulate their philosophy in such a wav that it had a subject matter all its own. which yet approximated the subject matter o f the natural sciences in terms o f its general character, and which could be approached by more or less scientific methods to yield more or less scientific knowledge. The existence o f the Scottish school and o f British Empiricism as embodiments o f this third response was possible precisely because they approached psychological phenomena in a more or less scientific way w ith the aim o f producing more or less scientific know ledge. I'hose in the British Empirical tradition seem to have regarded themselves as sufficiently scientific— they were, after all. looking to establish inductively, on the basis o f introspective observation, certain "laws o f the mind." However, this approach fell short o f scientific knowledge insofar as the mental phenomena that constituted its subject-matter could be neither publicly observed nor precisely measured. The resulting shortcomings with respect to the scientistic ideals I have mentioned are most readily grasped in Bentham's attempt to develop a moral science on the basis o f the Empirical philosophy. Coupling the general form o f the Empirical philosophy with the belief that moral value was grounded in pleasure. Bentham proposed that the principle o f utility— the greatest good for the greatest number— was a formula for the highest good, and one which could be used after the manner o f a scientific law to direct our moral choices. In order to know w hat to do (a v ery practical sort o f knowledge), one simply had to determine how much pleasure, or its opposite, pain, would be produced by this or that course o f action, and then choose the one which yielded the most pleasure. This is roughly scientific, at least when compared to alternativ es o f Bentham's Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 114 day like intuitionist or divine-command theories. True to the Empiricist model, the subject matter o f Bentham's moral science was a type o f mental state— states o f pain and pleasure. His method was analytic and empirical— by careful observation, one was to analyze the pain or pleasure a possible course o f action w ould cause in terms o f intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent. The knowledge thus acquired would be grounded in observation (in a wide sense), and would be supremely useful. However, like other mental states, there is no obvious wav- to measure states o f pain o r pleasure. O f the seven more specific aspects in terms o f which such states were to be evaluated, only duration, propinquity, and extent seem to stand a chance o f being rigorously quantified. Intensity, certainty , fecundity , and purity are. practically speaking, not quantifiable. We can sometimes compare pleasures in ‘'rough" quantificational terms like more and less, but a more fine grained quantification o f these phenomena seems to be impossible. Copleston has suggested that we might, in an effort to be charitable, interpret Bentham's proposed calculus as a technique for "rough calculation" in terms o f more and less. The alternative is to regard it as an impossible system. Even if we regard it in the way Copleston suggests, however, the technique falls far short o f the mathematical precision required by the scientific ideal. Furthermore, states o f pain and pleasure are not "public." or inter-subjectively inspectable. We are thus unable to achieve an objectiv e comparison o f the pleasure- and pain-states o f any two or more people even in rough terms. This significantly diminishes the usefulness o f the know ledge y ielded by Bentham's method. So. when I said earlier that Empiricism tried to save philosophy by finding it a more or less scientific subject matter which could be approached by methods more or less scientific to yield knowledge more or less scientific, it turns out in every case that Empiricism comes Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. down on the "less" side o f things. This alone would not have been enough to reject philosophy as a true science o f the mental— it may have turned out that this was the closest approximation to science possible in the study o f mental phenomena. In fact, however, it turned out that the same subject matter could be approached in a more scientific way— the way o f experimental psychology . Unlike the empirical philosophy , experimental psy chology dealt with publicly observable, presumably quantifiable objects— behaviors— which were supposed to be correlated to various mental states, as in Comte's positivistic view o f psychology. It was not immediately recognized that experimental psychology presented a challenge for the Empirical philosophy . For over a century. the quasi-scieutitic. philosophical psychology (or. rather, psychological philosophy) o f the British Empiricists coexisted with the more fully scientific psychology o f Hartley and his followers. Both were considered to be two aspects o f one and the same philosophical endeavor. Like the other so-called separate sciences, it took some time to recognize experimental psychology as a genericallv different endeavor from that o f the Empiricists. When psychology came, in the latter part o f the nineteenth century to be seen more clearly as a separate science. British Empiricism failed as an attempt to create a scientific philosophy , and philosophy was again sent in search o f a subject matter and a method in virtue o f which it could be considered a science. What is true o f British Empiricism in this regard is a fo rtio ri the case with regard to the Scottish school. As we have seen, the Scottish school rejected the possibility o f a phy siological account o f mental phenomena. As a result, when experimental psychology began to develop and to gain prominence, it became clear that Scottish psychological philosophy was something other than a psychological science. British Empiricism, on the other hand. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I 16 because it was open to this possibility, was tor a time able to maintain an ambiguous position w ith regard to its scientific status. It was able to maintain this ambiguous place until it became clear that experimental psychology was a generically different investigation, capable o f yielding knowledge both promising w ith regard to its fruitfulness and more perfectly scientific than the sort o f know ledge acquired through introspection. The ambiguity o f the status o f the Empirical school is best seen in comparison w ith Comtean Positivism. 4. ~ The Ambiguous Position o f the Empirical Philosophy, and its Disambiguation If we step back for a moment and look not just at British philosophv. but at the development o f Western philosophy on the whole, the most notable dev elopment to come on the heels o f the initial wave o f attempts to make philosophv more scientific was the Kantian turn. To a degree, the Kantian turn can be seen as curbing the scientistic drive. Though it grants em pirical knowledge full legitim acy and is careful not to encroach upon the territory o f the sciences. Kant's philosophy nonetheless can be taken as a moderate attempt to retain as a subject matter for philosophv some sort o f ultimate reality— a reality which provided the conditions o f the possibility o f experience and empirical knowledge. Thus, in the final analysis. Kant seems to have resisted scientism, as did the rationalists, and seems to hav e shared w ith them the view that science, and indeed experience itself, had to be grounded in a system o f a p rio ri metaphysics. Kant's moderate attempt to save metaphysics, as is well known, was immediately followed by a series o f terribly immoderate versions o f post-Kantian transcendentalism, the most influential o f which was Hegelianism. Though these systems were, for a time, immensely popular, the speculative energy o f German romanticism eventually wore itself Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. out. As the tlust settled over the transcendental movement on the Continent, the scientistic drive was found alive and well in the form o f Comtean Positivism. In Ribot's report on the state of philosophy in France (Ribot 1877), he lauds Positivism as hav ing "the merit o f being for many years the only philosophy we had which was founded on science, the only doctrine which addressed itself to men o f science desirous o f obtaining broad v iews and general ideas" (ibid.. p. 374). I have already explained how it is that Positivism is at once a philosophy and anti-philosophical. Insofar as it is a philosophy , it can be described as a scientific philosophy, in two senses. First, the foundation o f the positivistic view o f knowledge (in Comtean Positivism, at any rate) is Comte's "law o f human development." which he believed could be established em pirically, via induction, and thus more-or-less scientifically. According to the law, all human epistemological development, both at the macro and the micro level, passes successively through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. "W hen the perfect comes, the imperfect is done away"; thus, since the scientific stage constitutes the best and most mature state o f humanity and human knowledge. Positivism promoted a robust scientism. It is thus scientific in a second sense. Comte rejected as futile the attempt to discover causal connections, and restricted all allegedly know ledge-producing research to the simple description o f empirically observ able relations regular enough to be called laws. "In the final, the positive state." he wrote, "the mind has given over the vain search after Absolute notions, the origin and destination o f the univ erse, and the causes o f phenomena, and applies itself to the study o f their laws.— that is. their invariable relations o f succession and resemblance" (in Gardiner 1969. p .134). Not surprisingly. Comte cites the Newtonian law o f gravitation as an example o f positive knowledge at its best: it provides, from an observational basis, a mathematically precise Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. IIS description o f the relations o f attraction and motion between objects. yet without bothering to worry about why things are related in that way. Philosophy exists in the Comtean world, but not in its traditional form. Comtean philosophy has abandoned the aspirations o f traditional metaphysics and has limited itself to the ordering, relating, and in short, ensuring the homogeneity of the results o f the special sciences. It is not itself in the business o f discovering new facts, but only o f collating facts it receives second-hand. It has no right to go to the phenomena o f the world directly. but must take them as they come mediated by the sciences. What it receives mediately are not the phenomena themselves, but scientific analyses o f the phenomena, the phenomena expressed in scientific terms o f quantity, and quantifiable and observable features. As such, it is not a genuine Held o f know ledge. Like British Empiricism. Comtean Positivism was never fully accepted by the official seats o f learning in its native land. Nonetheless, it began to gain some popular ground around the middle o f the nineteenth-century. Eventually, two divergent schools arose. On the one hand there was orthodox positivism, headed by Lafitte. which accepted the whole o f Comte's v ision for a spiritual and political organization o f humanity around his philosophy . On the other hand, there were the so-called "dissenters." headed by l.ittre. They accepted Comte's view o f philosophy, but rejected the religious and political aspects o f his system. In both incarnations. Comtean Positivism failed to gain a lasting following. According to Ribot, the main reason for this was the influence o f the British Empirical school in France, which, perhaps surprisingly, was found to be much more amenable to the scientistic spirit:: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I 19 Unhappily [Positivism] has remained closely confined within its own dogma. persuaded that nothing ought to be added or subtracted from it: it maintains that the only fruitful schools are those which remain pure, whilst history, on the contrary , teaches us that none last but those that are being constantly m odified. ... in our opinion what has most impaired the influence o f M. Littre and his followers, is the introduction into France o f a much wider positivism, often spoken o f among us by the name o f 'contemporary English philosophy.' Positivism, which is a rounded and finished doctrine claiming to be unchangeable, must not be confounded with the positive spirit, which is only a method o f philosophizing. There are in France many people, especially amongst those possessing scientific culture, who. while distrusting metaphysic, and maintaining that speculations should always be supported by facts, have yet no wish to be shut up within the narrow bounds o f a fixed school like positivism, and who think that if it is a question o f adhering to a dogma, fixed once and for all. philosophizing is not worth the trouble. To these men... English positivism— represented in different degrees by Stuart M ill. Herbert Spencer. Bain. Lewes, Huxley, and Tyndall— has furnished a standing ground. (Ribot 1877. pp. 374 f.) What Ribot calls the "positive spirit" stands behind the phenomenon I have been calling the "scientistic drive." It is the view or the attitude that the method o f empirical science is the standard for knowledge, that anything falling sufficiently short o f that standard is not worth wasting one’s energy on. either in terms o f try ing to figure out whether it is true or false or in terms o f investing oneself in it through belief. Ironically. British Empiricism proved to embody the positive spirit, and thus to participate in the scientistic drive, more fully than Positiv ism. In many respects. Positivism is very much like British Empiricism, especially in its I lumean form. Famously. Hume had believed that many things we often take to be given in our experience, e.g.. substance, personal identity , and causal relations, etc.. are fictions which the imagination and memory are jointly encouraged to produce in reaction to three relations among impressions: resemblance, spatial and temporal contiguity, and constant conjunction. Because things appear to be similar, seem to be uninterrupted, and are usually found in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 120 same combinations and orders, we become accustomed to these regularities, and. as Hume savs. "we often feign some new and unintelligible principle that connects objects together, and prev ents their interruption and variation.” Under such an ideology, the search for causes and necessary relations becomes a vain endeavor, just as Comte believed. One notable difference between Hume and Comte, however, is that whereas Hume was genuinely troubled over there being no knowable ground for the observable regularities o f experience. Comte was not. In the naive common-sensism which often accompanied the realism o f the scientific spirit. Comte and the Positivists simplv refused to be bothered by the grounds for skepticism, latent in empiricism, which Hume had laid out so clearlv. It has been suggested (Prosch 1964. p.83) that the lack or presence o f worry over such issues was fundamental in bringing about the modern distinction between philosophy and science. Those who worried over such things, and who thus tended to remain at least moderately skeptical about science and the status o f knowledge in general, were to become regarded as philosophers, while those who. without such worrv. gleeful I v accepted Newton's theory and methodology were to become regarded as scientists. At the same time, it was just this element o f reservation that kept those in the line ofH um e from making Empiricism into a finished doctrine, a tixed school, as we have seen Comtean Positiv ism described. Indeed, a consistent application o f the principles o f the Empirical school required that one be committed to a perennial agnosticism w ith regard to certain issues, in the sense that even the best-supported inductive generalizations must be regarded as perennially falsifiable and hence revisable and non-absolute. As Kant, in destroying knowledge, made room for faith, it turned out that Empiricism, in doing likewise, had Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. made room for progress.1 '' This allowed it to keep pace with the scientistic drive better than any o f the other philosophical alternatives then available. Thus this element o f skepticism or reservation, w hile it may well be the root o f the division between scientists and philosophers, proved also to be the feature that allowed the Empirical philosophy to maintain its scientific standing even as science began to leas e other schools o f philosophy behind. The foremost example o f the progressive adaptability o f the Empirical school is found in its relationship to experimental psychology. Throughout most o f the nineteenth- century. one o f the issues upon which the Empirical school took no absolute stance was how best to approach the study o f psychological phenomena. Comte had dogmatically maintained "the absurdity o f the supposition of a man seeing him self think" (in Ciardiner l% 9 . p. 153). and insisted that the mind— really the brain, the "cerebral ganglions" (ibid.. p. 152)— could be known only through the behav iors supposed to result from mental activ ity . On this v iew, introspection is rejected as a means o f study ing the internal world o f thought and feeling, and psychology is accordingly reduced to behavioristic and experimental psychology. The Scottish school, as we have seen, took up the opposite position, rejecting the possibility o f a physiological account o f mind. Meanwhile. Hume and his followers, unable to deny either possibility , took up a position somewhat in between the two extremes. On the one hand, they freely made use o f evidence from introspection. On the other, they maintained a close alliance to the experimental psychologists. 1 1 For example, the substance agnosticism inaugurated by Locke allowed that substance, even material substance, could be any thing. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In the British context, the drive toward experimental psychology arose naturally out o f the dri\e to apply the scientific method to new realms o f phenomena. Its first fully fledged British incarnation came from Hume's contemporary David Hartley , who. in 1749. published a theory according to which psychological phenomena are correlated with physiological phenomena— specifically, vibrations in the brain and nerves— in principle publicly observable and quantifiable. In its British form, experimental psychology was not opposed to introspection. Perhaps that was due to the fact that, in the British context, the first psychological investigations had taken place under the banner o f philosophy and by a method o f introspection. In any case, there was initially no antagonism between the two approaches to psychology. In fact, they seemed to regard each other as more or less complementary, finis Ci. C. Robertson, in the second volume o f Mind, places Hartley alongside Hume as a major figure in British philosophical thought, noting that "psychology...cannot be neglected in a history o f philosophic thought in England, where it has been so steadily cultivated without being loo carefully discriminated from philosophy proper" ( Robertson 1877. p. 358). Mind itself stands as a monument to the ambiguous, or confused (in the literal sense o f mingling together different things and treating them as one) state o f philosophy at this time. M ind was founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain, then the leading representativ e o f the Empirical tradition in Britain. His great achievement was to bring the associationist psychology o f Hartley. M ill. etc.. up to date by relating it to what were then the most modern theories o f physiology, and thus to lay the groundwork for much progress in experimental psychology. Dubbing it "a quarterly review o f psy chology and philosophy ." Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Bain founded M in d for the express purpose o f continuing research in the line o f Bacon. Hobbes. Loeke. Berkeley. Hume. Hartley, and the M ills.'" Hand-selected by Bain as its first editor. George Croom Robertson explained the intended purpose o f M ind and the journal’ s guiding conception o f philosophy in his ''Prefatory Words” to the first issue. On the one hand. Robertson’s conception o f philosophy seems to be quite in line with the overall scientistic drive o f modern thought. I le begins by expressing concern for the aforementioned school o f thought in British philosophy— the one that, as we have seen, had become at least quasi-scientific in its own method and subject matter, and which had embodied the positive spirit enough to maintain an alliance with empirical psychology. He laments the fact that it had theretofore lacked an academic forum for development. Since the great figures in this school had been excluded from academic positions, he observes, their philosophy had to be done "at the beginning or at the end or in the pauses o f lives otherwise active” (Robertson 1876 a. p. I ). with the consequence that the development o f this philosophy had been greatly hampered. “ The informality o f their thought." Robertson comments, "has undoubtedly presented philosophy from obtaining the scientific consideration which it holds elsewhere" (ibid.). 1 1 This is not to say that M ind was an intentionally partisan publication. Nonetheless, the special interest o f Bain and Robertson in the psychological approach to philosophy developed in this line o f thinkers certainly had its effects on the journal’s focus. As W.R. Sorely w as later to point out. the first few years o f Mind do not adequately reflect what was y et the fact that the type o f thought inspired by Kant and Hegel was at the time among the most livin g forces in English philosophy. It had attracted a number o f the most distinguished teachers and in some o f the universities had captured the ablest students. It is astonishing that in the first number o f Mind, in an article on Philosophy at Oxford. Mark Pattison could speak o f 'the present stagnation o f philosophical thought among us.’" (Sorely 1926. p. 413: cf. note 18) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 124 When Robertson mentions that philosophy already had obtained scientific consideration "elsewhere." one place he must have had in mind was Germain. There. philosophy had achieved scientific consideration in the hands o f figures like Helmholtz and Wundt, whom Robertson explicitly mentions as exemplifying "the best philosophical w ork" being done in that day (ibid.. p. 2. my italics). It is not surprising, therefore, that, in soliciting an author for a contribution 011 the state o f philosophy in Germain (to be included in the aforementioned series o f articles on the "state-of-the-art"). Robertson approached W undt. In his article. Wundt notes the emergence o f a new realist movement in German academic philosophy (as opposed to the transcendental idealism which had been dominant in the first half o f the nineteenth-century) that "connects itself much less closely than the idealistic movement with Kant, joining 011 rather to Locke and llume or Auguste C om te" (W undt 1877. p. 517). As we have seen, the common feature o f these three figures, and the one which seems to have been so appealing at that time, was their embodiment o f the positive spirit. In connection with this realistic movement, he notes the prevailing positiv istic opinion that "the time has by no means yet come for the construction o f a definite philosophy," and that, "fo r the present there can be no question o f setting up comprehensive metaphysical systems which, like those that have just gone down, must seem to the next generation phantastic illusions rather than works o f science" (ibid.. p. 518). Instead, the aim o f this movement was to establish a scientific philosophy : a project whose development. Wundt notes, was the express aim o f a journal recently founded by Richard Avenarius. A ll o f this, he suggests. ... shows plainly that the time is passed when philosophy can hope to live apart from the other sciences. We see..., at the present time, all interest turned 011 those two departments o f philosophy that are o f most account for the building up a universal science, viz.. Psychology and the Theory o f Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cognition. ... The philosophical movement in Germans presents everywhere the spectacle o f preparation for a step to be taken forward. (ibid.. p. 518) Insofar as Wundt and his discussion o f the realist movement in Germans give us some sense o f the contours o f Robertson's philosophical ideals, it seems to be very much in line with the scientistic drive o f modern thought. Furthermore, on the basis o f these remarks, one might suppose that M ind ssas founded for much the same purpose as Asinarius' journal— viz.. the advancement o f a scientific philosophy. This is indeed the case. As a result o f the progress the journal would afford. Robertson hoped that M ind would contribute to and eventually decide the debate over the scientific status o f psychology. Though he believed that psychology had been fruitful. Robertson admitted that it had not been as fruitful as some had hoped, and that "it has by no means won the rank o f an assured science in the common esteem.'- "N ow . if there were a journal." he w rote. that set itself to record all advances in psychology, and gave encouragement to special researchers by its readiness to publish them, the uncertainty hanging over the subject could hardly fail to be dispelled. [Zither psychology would in time pass with general consent into the company o f the sciences, or the hollowness o f its pretensions would be plainly revealed. (Robertson 1876, p. 3) M in d was to be that journal. As Robertson went on to say. "nothing less, in fact, is aimed at the publication o f M IN D than to procure a decision o f this question as to the scientific standing o f psychology" (ibid.). I f one were to stop here, about halfway through Robertson's piece, one might be left with the impression that his concept o f philosophy was limited to experimental Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. psychology. A fter all. he begins with a concern about the scientific status o f philosophy and ends up talking about the scientific status o f psychology, apparently thinking that demonstrating the latter w ill serve to demonstrate the former: and. o f course, the scientific status of psychology was best represented by experimental psychology. Also, just as Wundt had thought that psychology was one o f the best candidates for the founding o f a universal science, so Robertson thought that philosophy, understood as a psychological science, would be able to restore to human knowledge the unity that was lost as the empirical sciences began to separate from traditional philosophy : The unity that once belonged to human knowledge under the name o f Philosophy, before the special sciences were, is now. when the sciences stand fast, again sought for under no other name than Philosophy . In such circumstances, the institution of a journal that should aim at gi\in g expression to all new philosophical ideas and at making English readers acquainted with the progress o f philosophical thought in other countries, cannot be regarded as inopportune, (ibid.. p. 2) I he idea that human knowledge is to be unified by philosophy (understood as a psychological science) is just what Hume had in mind when he proposed to dc\elop a "science o f Man." Hume resembles traditional philosophers like Descartes in that he felt a need to ground the empirical sciences. However, he differs from them in that he had in mind to give it an empirical foundation in the form o f a master science, using, as we have seen, a method approximating the scientific method— not. as in traditional philosophy, a metaphy sical foundation established by a p rio ri reasoning. Thus far. Robertson's conception o f philosophy seems to be in line with the overall scientistic drive o f modern thought. However, i f one were to continue reading, he would find within a few pages that Robertson's conception o f philosophy included elements Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which arc quite out o f line with the scientistic drive o f modern thought. First, there seemed to be hanging on. even in the British Empirical tradition at tiie end o f the nineteenth- century. something o f the traditional idea that philosophy had to do with general issues. As a result. Robertson believed that the kind o f exactness and agreement-compelling certitude that characterizes the sciences is impossible in philosophy: The kind o f agreement that is possible in special branches o f physical science, is not possible in the region o f general philosophy. How should it be possible, when the conditions o f verification are so utterly different'.’ It is almost absurd to think o f it even as desirable. Physical science itself, as it becomes general, grows to be contested: neither the word 'science' nor the word 'physical' has any virtue to charm away the possibilities o f dissension that generality enfolds. The larger conceptions and principles o f physical inquiry are so notoriously under dispute at the present day that it is almost trivial to mention the fact— not wholly trivial, only because it is so apt to be forgotten when the question turns upon the credit o f philosophical doctrines. To bring philosophical inquiries, as far as possible, to their psychological base, seems the most that can be done to procure agreement in a sphere o f thought where there must alway s be the w idest scope for difference o f opinion, (ibid.. p. 5) Second. Robertson believed that psychological phenomena are fundamentally subjective, and that our subjective awareness o f them is fundamental in studying them: whatever place may be claimed for it among the sciences in respect o f its method, psychology in respect o f its subject must stand forever apart ... in a most serious sense, [its subject) extends to all that exists, because that which hv c a ll Nature, in a ll its aspects a nil a ll its departments, must have an expression in terms o f thought or subjective experience, it is in this view that Psychology may be shown to pass inevitably into Philosophy, but let it suffice here to have merely suggested why. although all objective lines o f inquiry bearing more or less strictly on mind w ill in turn be pursued in these pages, the fundamental consideration o f mind is and must he subjective. Whoever enters into this position is able, without abandoning the firm ground o f the positive sciences, to put him self in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. relation with the philosophical thought o f all time and is raised abo\e narrowing influences o f modern specialism, (ibid.. p. 4. my italics) On the one hand. Robertson clearly wants to develop philosophy as a psychological science: and. in line w ith the Empirical tradition, he maintains the unity o f philosophy with experimental psychology, treating them as two complementary approaches to the same subject matter, constituting one unified endeavor. On the other, he insists both that philosophy has to do with generalities, and thus that it cannot attain to the lex el o f exactness and certitude proper to the other sciences, and that psychological phenomena are fundamentally subjective, that the primary approach to psychological phenomena is the subjective approach. Such views immediately strike the contemporary mind as inconsistent: and the view that one can adopt the subjective stance with regard to the phenomena o f mind "without abandoning the firm ground o f the positive sciences" strikes the contemporary mind as false. W'hat is difficult but imperative to keep in mind is that they did not appear so to Robertson. One can imagine a number o f way s in which these v iews might be held consistently. If one were to suppose that the subjective and objective approaches were just two ways o f coming at the same thing, and that "the firm ground o f the positive sciences" did not depend upon specificity, public observability , and quantificational precision, then there might not be a logical problem. This sort o f substandard view o f science was a possibility for Robertson. We have already seen that the general form o f British Empiricism was only quasi-scientific. lacking a quantifiable and publicly-observable subject matter. Also, we have seen that Robertson held a substandard view o f science with regard to his views about generality, exactness, and so on. Alternatively. Robertson's views about the relation o f philosophy and psychology may Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 129 have saved him from being inconsistent. Robertson clearly believed that philosophy and psychology were one and the same endeavor in virtue o f their shared subject matter. Perhaps he also believed that the scientific status o f psychology, which he believed would be won bv experimental psychology, would, in virtue o f their identity, attach to philosophy as well. In this case, the inconsistency and falsehood would disappear. In either case, however, such a view would hardly have enabled philosophy or psychology to win scientific status “ in the common esteem." as Robertson desired: for. in terms o f the prevailing tendencies o f thought, neither o f these views would remain plausible. On the one hand, it was to become generally accepted that public observability and quantifiability. as well as specificity, were essential for the proper scientific treatment o f a subject. There arc today many who believe that the constituents o f subjective experience are identical to some set o f objective, measurable, physical correlates: and m ain, but not all. o f these hope that this may yet be proven (ef. Nagel 1994. Shoemaker 1994. McGinn 1994). At the same time, it is almost universally agreed that the possibility o f a scientific understanding o f psychological phenomena depends upon leaving aside their subjective presentation and concentrating instead on their objective correlates (ef. Nagel 1994). Thus, it no longer seems possible to treat the subjective and objective as complementary approaches to the same subject matter, capable o f mutually supporting one another in the creation o f one unified science o f mental phenomena.'1 As a result, it is no longer possible to believe that the scientific status o f experimental psychology is at all transferable to philosophy. :1.1 fo rtio ri, it is no longer possible to treat the subjective approach as fundamental. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 130 We can see. then, how Robertson exemplifies the confused state o f the Empirical philosophy at the end o f the nineteenth-century. Robertson’s view , w hich is representative o f the British Empirical school in the late nineteenth century, must be understood to treat as identical things which, from the contemporary perspective, are clearly different, and as compatible things which, again from the contemporary perspective, are clearly not. The fact that these things were different and/or incompatible was something to which the philosophical and psychological communities only slow ly became awake. One o f the first incompatibilities o f w hich they became aware had to do w ith the philosophers' contention that the subjective approach was equally legitimate and even more fundamental to psychological studies than the objective approach via physiological correlates. This became one o f the two major points o f contention between philosophy and experimental psychology toward the end o f the nineteenth-century. In the years after Afincf s debut, experimental psychology began to pull away from philosophy w ith the result that less o f a psychological nature was accomplished in M ind than Robertson had initially hoped. In its the seventh year o f publication. Robertson admitted with disappointment that "the Journal has not yet succeeded in fostering— i f it m ight have been expected to foster— such habits o f specialized investigation in psychology, as are characteristic o f the workers in other departments o f science" (quoted in Sorely 1926. p. 41 1). Robertson's disappointment was not directed at ain lack o f progress in psychology itself. It had been developing quite nicely, and had come much closer to achieving the rank o f science in the common esteem, just as he had w ished for it in 1876. llis disappointment was with M ind itself, and w ith the lack o f influence it had had in fostering this progress. The separation o f psychology and philosophy initially was due to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the fact that the experimental psychologists had begun to feel that their efforts and interests were being diluted and even held back as a result o f being conjoined to philosophy. Quite probably. they began to see that the subjective approach had little to do with their own business as experimental psychologists. A t the very least, they began to find annoying the tendency ol philosophers to address issues which were not all germane to their psychological projects— as Robertson had pointed out. the whole o f nature was given subjectively, and thus could be considered an extended part o f psychological study. I his latter problem was instrumental in bringing about the founding o f the American Philosophical Association, which emerged out o f the American Psychological Association in 1901. 'I he latter was founded in 1891. in the era when experimental psychology was just in the process o f distancing itself from philosophy. A t the beginning, the membership o f the American Psychological Association included philosophers and psychologists co-mingled. with the result that there were often papers presented at meetings ol the Association on topics more properly philosophical than psychological — "topics e\ ideally inappropriate in a meeting o f psychologists" (Gardiner 1926. p. 145). Both the psychologists and the philosophers soon began to realize that their interests and endeavors were too different to manage under the head o f a single professional Association: the state o f affairs... was satisfactory neither to the philosophers nor to the psychologists. The philosophers were fully aware o f the anomalies o f a situation in which their claims were allowed only on sufferance: the psychologists were disposed to regard these claims as an impertinence and to resent the intrusion o f the philosophieal camel into the psychological tent. (Gardiner 1926, p. 146) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ill 1896. a motion was made to reorganize the Association so as to include a philosophical contingent separate from the psychological contingent. By 1898. no formal action had been taken, but an informal division was created by arranging the programs for the Association's meetings by subject-matter. A ll the philosophical papers were placed together in one section o f the program, and the psychological papers in another. B\ 1901. the philosophical contingent had decided that enough was enough, and that thc\ would start their own association. Thus we see that, toward the end o f the nineteenth-century, the alliance between psychology and the Empirical philosophy was beginning to dissolve, mainly because o f the latter’s insistence on the primacy o f the subjective presentation o f ps\etiological phenomena and its interest in the broader and more general issues o f mind, all o f which contributed to a general lack o f exactness and o f agreement-compelling certitude. This stood out in stark contrast to experimental philosophy, which resembled the other sciences much more closely. As a result, it became clear that philosophy was not a psychological science. TV The ( 'risis in Philosophy at the Ernl o f the Xineteenth Century I w ill begin this section by giving a synopsis o f the story I have told thus far. As we have seen, philosophers have responded in three main ways to the rise o f modern science and the ensuing scientistic drive in modern thought. First, some have opposed these phenomena. Initially, the main form o f opposition was the attempt to hold on to traditional philosophy, with its claim that science is to be grounded in a system at’a priori metaphysics, and must take its place in a wider philosophical Weltanschauung. Second. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sonic have wholeheartedly embraced them— Comte, for example, who. seeing philosophy as the merely penultimate stage o f epistemic evolution, believed that it ought to be discarded like a garment outgrown. Third, some, like Locke. Hume, and even Kant, tried to find a middle ground which would allow philosophy to retain legitimacy as a human endeavor and as a Held o f knowledge. By the middle o f the eighteenth century, the traditional view as a form o f the second response had been rejected by and large. In terms o f the prevailing tendencies o f thought, philosophy was left with two alternatives: the first or the third response. O f these, only the third was capable o f preserv ing philosophy as a field o f know ledge. W ithin the general contours o f the third response, one had a number o f options, the most prominent o f which were Kantian Transcendentalism and British [Empiricism. I hough it initially enjoyed great popularity, the Kantian middle ground eventually gave way. This is just as true o f post-Kantian systems in Britain as on the Continent. It is well- known that Analytic Philosophy initially began to develop out of Moore's and Russell's reaction against Absolute Idealism in its British form; and while it is true that British Idealism enjoyed immense popularity for a time, it was rather short-lived. Thus Carre quite rightly has described it as a "b rie f interruption" in the otherwise steady emergence o f "a distinctive British method and doctrine" in philosophy (Carre 1949. pp. i.\ f.). That method and doctrine was epitomized in the empirical philosophy o f Locke. Hume. M ill. etc.. and was. in a general way. adopted by the Scottish school which has come to be known as common- sense philosophy. The core o f this distinctive British approach to philosophy was a metaphilosophical stance according to which psychological phenomena constitute the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. proper subject matter o f philosophy, and introspective empirical observation combined with reductive analysis form the proper method. During the nineteenth century, attempts to correlate psychological and physiological phenomena eventuated in the development o f experimental psychology Because it involved as part o f its subject matter things both publiclv observable and. in principle at least, measurable, experimental psychology was able to approach what was then thought o f as philosophy's subject matter in a more scientific way. with the promise o f more scientific results. Philosophy, tethered as it was to the subjective. 11011- quantiliable features o f psychological phenomena, held no such promise. Thus, as it continued to develop, experimental psychology slowly began to pull away from philosophy. The Scottish school, which insisted that a physiological study o f mental phenomena was impossible, was separated from experimental psychology early on. and was immediately deprived o f its scientific status. The Empirical school, however, was not able to deny the possibility o f such a study— in fact, they were not able to deny the possibility o f much anything." This non-committal attitude allowed the Empirical school to maintain its allegiance with experimental psychology for a while longer. The Empirical school remained tethered to its subjective approach, however, and this proved to be its undoing. Eventually the experimental psychologists came to feel that the claims o f the Empirical school were, if not truly incompatible with their endeav or, at least not necessary " This feature o f British Empiricism, at least in its Humean and post-Humean forms, is what made it especially amenable to positivism. Arguably, the opposite o f positivism is "modalism": not the ancient heresy, but the belief that is possible to know what may and must be. and thus the belief in necessity and possibility. Positivists do not make pronouncements on what may or must be: they are only interested in what /.v. in the sense o f what happens to he. Since impossibility is a kind o f negative necessity, and since Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to it. and burdensome to boot. The continued intermingling o f subjective uith objective studies served only to detract from the focus on. and thus from the progress of. the objecti\e and experimental side o f psychology. As a result, it was eventually realized that philosophy and experimental psychology were not two sides ot the same coin after all. Far from being complementary endeavors, they were seen to be radically different. And. in the competition for scientific status, experimental psychology w on out. Just as it had retreated from e\ery other part o f the world to which the scientific method had been applied, philosophy found itself ha\ing to abandon what had been for over a century its last stronghold (cf. W illard 1684. pp. 256 ff.). Philosophy was once again faced with the question o f how to respond to the scientistic drive. Unless a new subject matter for philosophy could be found, the only alternative was full capitulation to the positivistic spirit, i.e.. to embrace the end o f philosophy. In the early volumes o f Mind. Shadworth Hodgson published a series o f three articles entitled "Philosophy and Science" which bear out this analysis o f philosophy's predicament in the last quarter o f the nineteenth century. Hodgson is fully aware o f the problem created by the rise o f experimental psy chology : Psy chology has all states o f consciousness for its object-matter: and so far it has precisely the same object-matter as that here attributed to philosophy. Now psychology is a science, and that science which is the peculiar glory o f Englishmen, having been if not created yet chiefly cultivated by them. It would seem then that, by simply adding the science o f psy chology to the list o f the other sciences, we cover the same ground and perform the same service as we should do by superposing philosophy on the sciences, as something generically different from them. One or the other appears superfluous, and in such a case the simplest expedient must positivists do not w ant to rule anything out a priori, they seem to feel especially at home in the Humean world where anything is possible, or. at least, nothing is impossible. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. be the best, and philosophy must give place to a less pretentious rival. (Hodgson 1876 b. p. 16) Hodgson's awareness o f this problem is in fact the primary impetus behind his series o f articles, the purpose o f which is to draw lines o f demarcation between philosophy and science in such a way that philosophy avoids superfluity and remains a unique field o f knowledge. Hodgson, for one. felt that making clear the distinction between philosophy and science was philosophy's most pressing business. In fact, he said, it was the first thing one had to do in philosophy: Ihe first thing to be done in Philosophy is to distinguish.— to distinguish in order to know what to define and what sorts o f notions to employ in defining it: and the first distinction to be established, and one which is pre requisite o f all the others, is between Philosophy and Science. Hie ground must first be won before we can proceed to distinguish the several provinces which it contains: there can be no distinctions within philosophy, unless there is a philosophy w hich is itself distinct from all other branches and kinds o f know ledge. (Hodgson 1876a. p. 6 < S ) Before we can go about doing any work in philosophy, we must make sure that there is such a thing as philosophy; and we can be sure o f this only if we can distinguish philosophy as a unique field o f knowledge over against the sciences. It w ill be thus distinguished only by "w inning ground." i.e.. by gaining a subject matter o f its own. At the same time. Hodgson exemplifies that attitude o f deference to science characteristic o f philosophy in the line o f Bacon. Hobbes. Locke. Berkeley. Hume. Hartley, and the M ills. He warns that in making the required distinction between philosophy and science, we must not make a separation, for "an unscientific philosophy would be no philosophy at a ll" (ibid.). Though philosophy 's lack o f ground was caused by the adv ance o f the sciences. Hodgson is clear that the ground philosophy needs to win is not to be won Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. back from the sciences. Instead, lie maintains that philosophy, considered as a science, is still in its infancy: and that, just as the empirical sciences took their stand as clearly defined "separate sciences" only through a long process o f disambiguation, so philosophy will eventually come to a clear understanding o f itself over time. Far from threatening the existence o f philosophy, the advance and the separation o f the modern sciences are to be considered a help insofar as they have awakened philosophy to what it was not. So. philosophy must accommodate the advance o f science by winning for the first time its own true subject matter from the unclaimed regions o f the knowable w orld. According to Hodgson, there were at that time four common ways o f drawing the distinction between philosophy and science. Two o f these were the Hegelian view, wherein the sciences are grounded in the science o f the Absolute, and the Comtean view, wherein philosophy is viewed as a secondary laborer, coordinating and systematizing the sciences and their discoveries. The problems with these two views have already been noted. Hach. in its own way. failed to satisfy the scientistic requirements o f modern thought. The Comtean view, as we have seen, had too great a sense o f fin a lity . Meanvv liile the Hegelian view was too "hypothetical." too systematic, and. worst o f all. it made science subordinate to a system o f metaphysics. O f these views, it was least compatible with the scientistic drive o f modern thought: and. though it was popular in Britain at that time (in the form o f British Idealism), it would soon prove incapable o f holding out against the scientistic mentality o f the age. The remaining two ways are the most important for understanding the real dilemma o f philosophy at that time— at least o f that "distinctive British method and doctrine" in philosophy which was the trademark o f philosophy 111 the line o f Bacon. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hobbes. Locke. Berkeley. Hume. Hartley, and the M ills — and the rise o f Analytic Philosophy in the face o f that dilemma. One o f these is the positivistic way. whereby one draws the line so that "nothing remains for philosophy but the preliminary guesses at truth which men have made before striking into the true methods o f disco\er\. which true methods with their results are science, and supersede the old mistakes which are philosopln" (ibid. p. 68). Hodgson notes that this way o f looking at things was verv prevalent in England at that time, and he suggests that it might be called "English Positivism." This is reminiscent o f Ribot's characterization o f Englis' f \ r Lv in the late 1870s as a "much w ider positivism." O f course. Ribot had in mind English philosopln in the line o f Bacon. Hobbes. Locke. Berkeley. Hume. Hartley, and the M ills: the line which culminated in Bain and his founding o f Mind: the line which was. at that time, having to abandon its connection to experimental psychology and thus to a scientific study o f mental phenomena. Hodgson names no names in discussing English Positivism, but one wonders if those he had in mind might not be characterizable as representatives o f that same tradition. In any case, this view would have been unacceptable to anvone wanting to maintain philosopln in existence as a Held o f knowledge: for. as Hodgson himself notes, " i f this were the true account o f the matter, philosopln w ould have no locus standi in the intellectual world, only the ignorant would be its votaries, and philosophers would be no better than obscurantists..." (ibid.. p.68). The fourth view is that o f G.LI. Lewes. Lewes shared with Hodgson’s "English Positivists" the view that most traditional philosophers, at least, were no better than obscurantists: an opinion which comes out clearly in his Biographical History o f Philosophy. Lewes him self was strongly influenced by Comte, and proposed that, in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ^ addition to the task o f coordinating and systematizing the results o f the sciences, philosopln also had the task o f "disproving and keeping out o f science all ontological entities" (ibid.. p. 69). His pejorative term for "ontological" was "m etem pirical." and among the metempirical were included such traditional philosophical items as substance, soul (mental substance), and the power o f agency. A ll were treated as "mere Inpostasized verbal abstractions, [w hich) should be rigorously excluded from a scientific philosophy" (Rogers 1922. p. 168).“ ' This view was not acceptable to Hodgson, for. as he went on to say. "the exclusion o f... the supra-sensible and metempirical from philosophy.... is tantamount to reducing the object-matter o f philosophy to the dimensions o f the object- matter of science" (Hodgson 1876 c. p. 358). It is mainly in contradistinction to Lewes' position that Hodgson develops bis own view ot the distinction between philosophy and science. His view depends upon a distinction between what he calls the subjective and objective aspects o f experience. Hodgson draws attention to "the apparent reduplication o f objects in subjectivity": Similarly. Bain (who. as we have seen, was identified by Ribot as an Lnglish positiv ist) proposed in 1877 that certain "metempirical" abstractions like existence and Descartes' co^ito could be done away with and. in fact, shown to be nothings, by the re-formulation o f language: In dealing w ith very difficult abstractions, logicians inculcate the practice o f resolving them into the corresponding particulars. The prescription is well put by Samuel Bailey thus:— 'i f the student o f philosophy would always, or at least in cases o f importance, adopt the rule o f throwing the abstract language in which it is so frequently couched into a concrete form, he would find it a powerful aid in dealing with the obscurities and perplexities o f metaphysical speculation. He would then see clearly the character o f the immense mass o f nothings which constitute w hat passes for philosophy.' (Bain 1877. p. 259) This is clearly an early example o f reductive linguistic-analy sis. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 140 "consciousness [is] like light, which reveals itself and the object at once: the object and the object seen are one" (Hodgson 1876b. p. 235). As a result, things given to us in experience may be considered either, as they ordinarily or pre-critically would, as external objects, denizens o f the external world, or merely as objects o f subjective experience, w ithout reference to any sort o f external reality. Hodgson believes that philosophy’ s unique subject matter consists in the objects o f experience qua subjectively given. Its purpose is to discover the what (Hodgson actually uses the Aristotelian formulation . o f things qua objects o f subjective consciousness. In these respects, among others. Hodgson's view o f philosopln is strikingly similar to Husserl's vision for phenomenology, viz.. that it be a science o f essences grounded in the phenomena, i.e. in "things" as they are given to a subject in experience. Hodgson's insistence that we can consider objects abstracted from all empirical context is sim ilar to Husserl's method o f "bracketing." There is also an important sim ilarity between Hodgson and Robertson, insofar as both seem to insist that philosophy has prim arily to do with the subjective aspect o f experience. It is noteworthy that not one o f these three philosophers hav e had much impact on the main currents o f Anglo-American philosophy. In the case o f Robertson and Hodgson, they are hardly remembered at all: and w hile Husserl has not been forgotten, he has been denied much serious attention. It seems to me that the main reasons for the ill fate o f these philosophers are. first, their common view o f philosopln as hav ing essentially to do with subjective experience, and. second, in the case o f Hodgson and Husserl, the use o f a metaphysical apparatus involv ing Aristotelian essences. In each o f these respects, their views o f philosophy fail to live up to the ideals o f scientism. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hodgson seems to have believed that the un-seientitlc character o f a subjective subject-matter could be counteracted by making the fundamental concepts o f the seiences the prim ary objeets o f philosophical investigation. One thing not infrequently referred to in discussions o f the rise o f the modern scientistic worldview is its replacement o f certain Aristotelian categories, like substance and accident, with concepts like matter, energw force, mass. and so on (cf. Burtt 1932). Likewise, in purelv mathematical sciences, there are fundamental concepts like unit and. in geometry, figured space. These can be characterized as the categories, or the ultimate explanatory concepts, o f the scientistic w orld\ iew. These were to be the primary objects o f philosophical analysis for Hodgson. Just as Robertson hoped that philosophy could maintain a scientific standing in v irtue o f its sharing a subject matter with experimental psychology. Hodgson hoped that it could do so In sharing a subject matter with science-in-general. On the other hand, again as with Robertson, while the identity o f subject matter was supposed to keep philosophy scientific, philosophy's standing as a unique and separate Held o f inquiry was thought to depend on how it approached that subject matter. Hodgson notes that, as they are used in the sciences, these concepts serve merely as principles for carrying out the process o f measuring and calculating. Accordingly. thev are defined in such terms as enable scientists to carry on with their work: "mass is measurable matter, ’quantity o f matter' being its definition” : to the question "wluit is a unit?” the mathematician responds "we can count anything once. This once is the unit o f enumeration" (ibid. p. 74). Thus, to define something is merely to give a functional or pragmatic definition, one which w ill allow the practice o f the science to continue in a productive wav. But definitions do not always capture the essences o f the phenomena Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 142 themselves as they are given in experience. They only capture the role o f the phenomena as they relate to a certain sort of scientific practice. This is where philosophical analysis comes in. f-'or Hodgson, philosophical analysis was reflective analysis. Since philosophy is to consider objects qua objects o f subjective experience, it must get at them b\ reflecting upon experience(s). Having adopted the approach o f subjective reflection, analysis, unlike definition, tells us what the thing is apart from any practical application. Its primarv aim is to lay a firm theoretical foundation for science: Ihese ultimate notions, ultimate to the physical and mathematical sciences, are not ultimate in all respects. They are ultimate in respect that we can securely reason downwards from them, that is to say. construct valid definitions o f them, and base valid demonstrations on them, in the physical and mathematical sciences: but not ultimate in respect that we can analyze them still further, reasoning upwards from them, and ascending to still higher generalities and greater abstractions. Their validity as the basis o f science is sought and found in what lies below them, in the concrete objects to which they are to be applied. It is conceivable thev should also have another validity as deductions, or cases, o f higher abstractions, to which they in their turn would serve as a basis o f validity and as concrete object-matter. The question whether any such higher abstractions are discoverable is thus posed by the sciences themselves: and the conditions o f its solution are also laid down in the posing. We are required to find an answer to the questions. What arc Mass, Energy. Matter, force. Cause. Motion. Unity. Length o f Time, and Configuration o f Space? And the conditions o f solution are. that the answer shall be in terms which do not repeat again the things about which the question is put.... but shall consist o f higher generalities or abstractions, which yet shall be really known to us (not fictitious), and shall thus present us with new knowledge about the things in question. In other words, the notions in question are to be analyzed or resolved in to elements more abstract than themselves, which elements, in composition, shall give us again the original notions. (Hodgson 1876 a. p. 76) Thus, philosophy's primarv goal is to secure the ultimate validity o f science by analyzing its fundamental concepts in terms o f higher generalities or abstractions which are not Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 143 mental constructs, but which arc given in experiences o f the entities to which those concepts refer. In this analytic endeavor. Hodgson felt philosophy could make a positive contribution to knowledge. At the same time. Hodgson felt that philosophv also had a constructive task. As he describes it. it is not unlike vvhat has come to be known as theoretical science (e.g.. theoretical physics). Its aim is to construct "hvpothetical w orlds” bv imagining whether or not certain differences in our own subjective analysis o f the ultimate elements o f our world might be possible given different modes o f cognition. This is taken to be a useful activ ity and that it might suggest certain explanatorv hypotheses to scientists: ...the hypothesis o f an universal Ether is a scientific hvpothesis. capable o f verification by means o f its consequences: but it is also an hvpothesis which we may easily imagine to have been suggested, in the lirst instance, bv speculations on hvpothetical worlds or their relations to our own. And supposing that to have been the case, we should then have an instance o f vvhat I intend by saving that hvpothescs in philosophy, not themselves verifiable, may conceivably suggest hypotheses in science which are or may become so. (Hodgson 1876 c. pp. 355 f.) Hodgson's insistence that philosophy have a constructive branch is vet another point o f contention between his view o f philosophy and the scientistic ideals o f the modern period. A ll in all. while Hodgson's articles illustrate the situation in which philosophy found itse lf at the end o f nineteenth-century, it does not illustrate vvhat came to be accepted as philosophy's best response to that situation. As we have seen. Hodgson's view o f philosophy failed in a number o f ways to meet the scientistic requirements for knowledge. It is noteworthy that, in the debate between Hodgson and Lewes, the main points o f contention are precisely those points in respect o f which Hodgson's view fails to live up Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 144 to the scientistic ideals o f modem thought. Full o f the positive spirit. Lewes denied the need fora theoretical grounding in science, as well as the legitimacy o f a subjective study o f science's fundamental concepts: and. o f course, he denied the legitimacy of philosophical construction. True to his Positivist roots. Lewes reduced philosophy to the role o f secretary and bouncer o f the sciences— its job was to coordinate the findings o f the sciences while keeping out any unwanted metempirical concepts or theories. For this reason. Hodgson charged Lewes with "reducing the object-matter o f philosophy to the dimensions ot the object-matter o f science." as we have seen. Philosophy for Lewes, insofar as it was different from science, could only be "the analvsis which effects the reduction o f philosophical to scientific problems" (Hodgson 1876 c. p. 358). A person even vaguely fam iliar w ith Analytic Philosophy w ill have already noticed, both in the earlier descriptions ot "English Positivism" and o f Lewes view and in the description o f Hodgson's view and his debate with Lewes, a number o f issues and ideas which seem very sim ilar to ones which were to become central in Analytic Philosophy. Like Lewes. Analytic philosophers into the 1960s denied any legitimate constructive activity to philosophy, refused to accept any essentially subjective subject matter or method, and tended to regard traditional philosophers as obscurantists who. having been fooled by language, misled others and hindered human intellectual progress. In 1893. a certain Professor Jones commented that "the tendency o f the 'young bloods.' ... is critical rather constructive. They evolve no systems. They suggest that system-making is not consistent with sobriety o f thought, and they confine themselves to analysis, the exposition o f difficulties and polem ic" (Jones 1893. p. 19). Although Jones does not identify any particular members o f this up and coming critical school, he notes Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 145 that they have been mainly concerned w ith challenging the Hegelians and neo-Hegelians. If these young bloods are not English positivists themselves, at least this shows that tliev had a common foe in the British Idealists. Another intriguing similarity is the self-conscious use o f "analytic" as a technical term to describe one o f the functions, or methods o f philosophy. It is commonK thought that analysis as a self-conscious method in philosophy originated with Ci. E. Moore: but this is not the case. As we have seen, it was around prior to Moore in the work of Hodgson. It may have seemed odd to the contemporary reader to have given so much space to a discussion o f a forgotten figure like Hodgson. However. 1 suspect he is more important to understanding the history o f Analy tic Philosophy than his present forgotten state would suggest, precisely because o f his similarities to Moore regarding the method of philosophical analysis."1 According to Hodgson. ... what most decisively distinguishes philosophy from psychology, as well as from all the other sciences, is its elevation o f Reflection [i.e.. reflective analysis] into a method In employing it we continually ask vvhat we mean by such and such terms, vvhat is the analysis o f such and such percepts. We have thus a method which is all-embracing in its scope, for there is no word, no thought, o f which this question may not and must not be asked. (Hodgson 1887 b. p. 227) In this statement, one might reasonably see a foreshadowing o f Moore's analyses of "meanings.” W hile I'm not aware o f any genuine historical evidence that suggests Hodgson had any direct influence on Moore, the two certainly knew each other. Hodgson was one o f the This is. at present, merely a suspicion. I have not yet had the opportunity to follow up on it. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 146 found ini: members o f the Aristotelian Society, in whose meetings Moore was a frequent participant: and Moore's first publication (Moore 1897). which was original!) presented before the Aristotelian Society, was a cooperative effort with Hodgson and Bernard Bosanquet. W hile it may not be the case that Hodgson had any direct influence on Moore, his views certainly formed part o f the general conceptual context in which Moore did his earl) work. Since this is so. Hodgson's views on anal)sis form part o f an important interpretive background against which Moore's use ofanalvsis must be understood. In an) case, the concept ot philosophical analvsis was around prior to Moore, and specific attention was locused on it in the context o f late nineteenth eenturv metaphilosophical reflection, especially in relation to the issue o f the scientific standing o f philosophy In the lace o f these similarities, one might reasonably suppose that the late nineteenth eenturv debate over the nature o f philosophy relative to science, epitomized here in the debate between Hodgson and Lewes, might be the best place to start developing an understanding o f the emergence o f Anal) tic Philosophy Indeed, unless I am mistaken, this debate must be understood as the primary spawning ground o f the linguistic turn. and. consequently, o f Analytic Philosophy. It seems to me that Analytic Philosophy arose prim arily as an attempt to meet philosophy’s need to preserve itself as a field o f knowledge in the face o f the scientistic driv e o f modern thought. In an illum inating retrospective. G ilbert Rvle offers a description o f the milieu in which the linguistic turn took place. Significantly, it bears out mv contention that the formulation o f a metaphilosophical view capable o f satisfying the scientistic drive o f modern thought was the fundamental issue in the linguistic turn and the rise o f Analytic Philosophy Between the time o f F. H. Bradley's undergraduate career (which began in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. !4~ !S6^) and that o f his own (c. 1920). Ryle reports that the academic world had shifted, both demographically and in terms o f general interest, in the direction o f the sciences. Whereas the universities had once been populated largely by clergy, both in the faculty and the student body, by Ryle's time theologians had become quite scarce. Instead, the universities were populated w ith students in a number o f secular fields, with mans in the natural and applied sciences. In terms o f general interest, the hot topics o f Ryle's day involved the work o f such figures as Cantor. Maxwell. Mendel. Marx. Ira/.er. and Freud (R vle 1963. p.3). With the shifting intellectual tendencies o f that roughly 50-year period. Ryle observes. ...the moment could not be long delayed when philosophers would challenge one another, and be challenged bv their new academic colleagues, especially the natural scientists, to state unequivocally what sort o f an enquiry philosophy was and vvhat were the canons o f its special methods. Already surrendering its historic linkage with 'mental science’ or psychology, and no longer remembering its former claim to be the science o f things transcendental, philosophy looked like losing its credentials as a science o f anything at all. (Ryle 1963, pp. 4 f.) As both the natural sciences and the social sciences abandoned their traditional positions as branches o f philosophy , philosophy was left wondering just vvhat it was the science of. As we have seen, this is really a question philosophy had been dealing with for over two centuries: but the issue had now come to a critical head. Philosophy had been deprived o f every answer it had previously given, and it would require a new and very creative answer in order to preserve itself as a field o f knowledge. This is. I believe, vvhat stands behind Wundt's declaration, quoted earlier, that "the time is passed when philosophy can hope to live apart from the other sciences." One gets the sense that, in W undt's mind, philosophy had been masquerading as a science, or Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 148 merely playing at being one. for some time: but there was to be no more o f that. The time had come for philosophy to grow up and make something o f itself, or. if it couldn't, to simply leave the company o f serious intellectual disciplines. It couldn't continue to live as a Held o f knowledge apart from the sciences. In order to live, it would have to live w ith them; and in order to live with them, it would have to be one o f them. Anglo philosophy at this time was. in many ways, in much the same state Analytic Philosophy finds itself in today— a state o f crisis stemming from the lack o f an adequate metaphilosophy. As the above statement from Rv le confirms, philosophers felt a pressing need to define their subject, and yet the same deference to science which exacerbated this ever present need constrained the ways in which philosophers could go about meeting it. Moore illustrates this attitude when he explains: One thing that is very commonly aimed at in discussing what philosophy is. is to give such a definition o f it as w ill ensure that no question discussed by philos[ophy] should be identical with any discussed by the sciences. It is felt that questions w hich fall within the province o f some special science can't fall within that o f philosophy. (Moore 1933. p. 178) Moore cites Broad as one who in particular tried to abide bv this rule. But it was. as he savs. something that was commonly aimed at. A new subject matter had to be found for philosophy, but one w hich would be unique among the sciences. And. o f course, in order to quality philosophy as a science, it had to be something that could be approached via a roughly scientific method. The situation was fertile ground for that revolution in philosophy that has come to be known as the linguistic turn, with its well-defined, i f ill- conceived. metaphilosophical program. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 149 5. Scientism in the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy 1: The Linguistic Thesis and its Supporters I .\feeling the Challenge. Averting the Crisis: Scientism in the Linguistic Thesis I said at the end o f the last section that the situation o f the end o f the nineteenth century was fertile ground for the metaphilosophical program that eventually came to characterize Analytic Philosophy; viz.. the view that the proper subject matter for philosophy is language and the proper method is analysis. I w ill begin this chapter bv saying why this is so. The scientific status o f philosophy was the crisis-issue at the end o f the nineteenth century. To be scientific, philosophy needed a method that was at least roughly scientific and a subject matter that could be approached by such a method. Since the time ot Locke, it had been pretty well established that the method o f philosophy would ha\e to be analysis rather than construction. The question was. analysis of what'? In the fissay. Locke had divided all sciences into three ty pes. Physics, or natural philosophy, was to study the natures o f things. Practics. which included ethics, was to studv the right and how best to attain it. Finally, semiotics, which Locke also calls logic and "the doctrine o f signs.” was to study "the Nature o f Signs, the M ind makes use o f for the understanding o f Things, or convey ing its Knowledge to others" (Locke 1975. p. 720). In the wake o f the scientistic drive, philosophy could not be a phy sical science; for the scientistic m ind would not countenance the wide sense in which Locke employed "physical." O f the two remaining possibilities, ethics was the least promising— indeed, every attempt at ethics that has been sufficiently scientific to satisfy the scientistic mentality has tailed (witness Benthamite utilitarianism and emotivism). That left semiotics as the only promising Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. avenue for developing a scientific philosophy. According to Locke, there are two kinds o f signs: ideas, which are signs for things external to the mind, and words, which are signs for ideas. Since the main business o f the empirical philosophy was the study o f ideas, it counted as a semiotic science on Locke's view. With the rise o f empirical psychology and its method o f studying ideas via their publicly observable causes and effects, however, it became impossible to maintain that the direct study o f ideas by introspection, which had been the method o f the empirical philosophy, was a scientific endeavor. What remained was the study o f words, the study o f language understood as a symbol-system. In the struggle to be scientific, language had certain advantages over ideas as a subject matter for philosophy. The main problem with ideas had been their subjective accessibility. The words by which ideas are expressed, on the other hand, are publicly accessible, and are thus empirical in the sense that matters for science. The concreteness o f linguistic symbolism also facilitated a closer approximation to mathematical precision. There had always been a certain vagueness involved in the analysis o f ideas (or perceptions, sensations, experiences, etc.) with regard to just where one experience ended and another began, and just what the units o f analysis were (i.e.. just vvhat counted as a simple idea). W ith language, on the other hand, things are at least prim a facie less vague. In language, we are confronted with sets o f discrete, empirical symbols that can be combined in various ways: so, it is at least a great deal clearer what is to count as a unit in language. It was this feature o f language that made it possible for the so-called ideal language philosophers to treat language as a calculus, and thus to approximate scientific methodology in yet another respect. The linguistic calculus, o f course, was the sort o f formal logic developed and used by Frege and Russell, among others. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. One o f the most characteristic features oflate nineteenth century logic was its anti- psychologistic stance. As we have seen, anti-psychologism in logic is often counted as a characteristic mark o f Analytic Philosophy. In fact, on Michael Dummelt's account (Dummett 1993). the anti-psychological stance o f Analytic Philosophy is supposed to deri\e from the anti-psychologism o f Fregean logic. However, this does not seem plausible. The view that logic is not psyehoiogistic pertains only to the nature o f logic: and it simply does not seem plausible that a view about the nature o f logic would have the kind o f large-scale metaphilosophical influence that was requisite for bringing about the linguistic turn. What is required in order to explain this phenomenon is a more general metaphilosophical view, and one that was accepted widely enough at the end o f the nineteenth century to account for the widespread acceptance o f the linguistic thesis. Now. a view about the nature o f logic might be able to have this kind o f influence 011 philosophy in general if it traced a path through whatever general metaphilosophical implications it might have. In the cases o f Frege and the early Russell, the non- psychologistic nature o f logic was taken to have ontological implications. Specificallv. it was taken to imply Platonism. And. o f course. Platonism has certain metaphilosophical implications i f one assumes, as Frege and Russell clearly did. that the denizens o f the Platonic realm are to be objects o f philosophical study. Flow ever, this is not the view that came to be characteristic o f Analytic Philosophy . In fact, as Dummett has observed. "... the linguistic turn can be seen as a device for continuing to treat thoughts as objectiv e and utterly disparate from inner mental events [i.e., for continuing to be anti-psychologisticJ. w ithout having recourse to the Platonistic m ythology" (Dummett 1993, p. 131): Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The importance o f the denial o f the mental character o f thoughts [i.e.. the denial o f psychologism], common to Bolzano. Frege. Meinong. and Husserl, did not lie in the philosophical mythology to which it gave rise— Frege's myth o f the 'third realm' or Husserl's o f 'ideal being'. It lav. rather, in the non-psychological direction given to the analysis o f concepts and propositions. It is. however, very clear why it was to lead to analytical philosophy, ... For if one accepts the initial step— the extrusion o f thoughts and their components from the mind— one may yet feel unhappy with the ontological mythology... One in this position has therefore to look about him to find something noil-mythological but objective and external to the individual mind to embody the thoughts which the individual subject grasps ... Where better to find it then in the institution o f a common language?" (Dummett, 1993. p. 25) So. the linguistic turn involved an attitude which smiled upon both formal logic and the anti-psychologistic stance o f certain late nineteenth-century logicians while it frowned upon the Platonism in which their non-psychologistic logic was grounded. It seems to me that the scientistic attitude in philosophy is the best explanation for the convergence o f these three factors in the rise o f Analytic Philosophy. The anti-psychologistic stance o f the late nineteenth century logicians complemented the non-psychological approach which philosophy in the line o f Bacon. Flobbes. Locke, Berkeley. Flume. Hartley, and the M ills found itself having to take in order to maintain its scientific status. As we have seen, the possibility o f retreating to the study o f linguistic symbols as a means o f remaining scientific had already been provided for in Locke's division o f the sciences. The techniques o f formal logic seemed to be a method for manipulating linguistic symbols (or their translations into logical notation) with the precision o f a mathematical calculus, and with the end o f "discovering" truth. Thus, by appropriating these techniques and making them central to philosophical practice, the new linguistic philosophy could approximate science more closely . The only respect in which formal logic v iolated the ilcsiclcraia o f a scientific philosophy was its connection to Platonism; but. as Dummett points out. this was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 153 easily circumvented by accepting the view that language, as a concrete, em pirical, social reality, was sufficiently objective and "extra-mental" to serve as an alternative to the Platonic realm. As Dummett puts it, "language is a social phenomenon, in no way private to the indiv idual, and its use is publicly observable" (Dummett 1993. p. 131). O f course, this is a philosophically loaded conception o f language, but it was just what philosophv needed at the time to remain scientific. Indeed, as one surveys the intellectual landscape o f the late nineteenth century, there is no better, and arguable no other, explanation than scientism for the combination o f mass-interest in a non-psychological approach to philosophv w ith a mass-interest in appropriating the use o f formal logic for that approach and a mass-unhappiness with Platonism, all o f which were present in the linguistic turn. .5 .2 Scientism in the Supporters of the Linguistic Thesis To demonstrate that scientism was a factor in the v ievvs of the supporters o f the linguistic thesis, one first has to determine just who its supporters were. Traditionally. Moore. Russell. W ittgenstein, and the Logical Positivists have been regarded as among the main forces behind the formulation and popularization o f the linguistic thesis/' In chapter Mv decision to include in this list neither Frege nor any representatives o f the ordinary language school beyond Wittgenstein in his second incarnation may seem questionable. The question o f Frege's status as a founder o f Analytic Philosophy has been settled to my satisfaction in the work o f Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker (Baker and Hacker. 1983. 1984. 1987. 1989). Hacker has noted that Frege him self was not interested in reforming philosophv the way all the early Analysts were: "Frege's professional life was a single- minded pursuit o f a demonstration that arithmetic had its foundations in pure logic alone ... One w ill search Frege's works in vain for a systematic discussion o f the nature of philosophy" (Hacker 1986. pp. 5, 7). Flacker also draws attention to a number o f respects in which Frege stands opposed to the metaphilosophical program o f earlv Analytic Philosophv: ... he thought that philosophical theses ( if logicism is a philosophical thesis) could be proved by a p rio ri argument ... [and| he thought that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2. I made references to recent scholarship which attempts to show that neither Moore nor Russell ever accepted the linguistic thesis. I w ill elaborate the case for the non-linguistic interpretation o f Moore and Russell in the next chapter. For now. it w ill have to suffice to say that I have found these studies very convincing. On the basis o f the non-linguistic interpretation o f Moore and Russell. I w ill treat only Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists as supporters o f the linguistic thesis in this chapter. .-I. Wittgenstein Warnock has noted that Wittgenstein's Tractatns poses hermeneutical difficulties similar to those o f a religious text (Warnock l% 6. p. 28). This is doublv so for his Philosophical Investigations. It is very difficult to say with any certainty what Wittgenstein's views were at any stage in his career. However, it seems indisputable that Wittgenstein accepted the linguistic thesis both in his earlier and later incarnations. True tat us 4.003 I is often regarded as the seminal statement o f the linguistic thesis: " A ll philosophv is a philosophy could make ontological discoveries, for example that concepts are really a species o f function and that truth and falsehood are special kinds o f objects, namely the values o f such functions for arguments. (ibid.. p. 7) So. it seems to me that Frege's whole importance for Analytic Philosophv lies in his corroboration, so to speak, o f Russell's work and his influence on Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists in the area o f mathematical logic. W ith regard to the ordinary language school. I see it as a secondary development in the history o f Analytic Philosophy. The metaphilosophical program which, on mv view, characterizes Analytic Philosophy was established mainly by the figures I w ill address. The Ordinary Language philosophers came along after and attempted to modify the program by employing a different philosophy o f language. It remained, however, within the parameters o f the already established metaphilosophical program. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 'critique o f language’ ...” (Wittgenstein 1921. p. 19). It is also represented in the Tractatns in such passages as: 4.112 Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body o f doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially o f clarifications. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification o f propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are. as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sure boundaries, (ibid. . p. 25) 4.115 [Philosophy] w ill signify what cannot be said. bv presenting clcarlv what can be said. (ibid.. p. 26) It’ s influence can also be seen in Wittgenstein's estimate o f traditional philosophical problems. As Russell put it: starting from the principles o f Symbolism and the relations which are necessary between words and things in any language, it [the Tractatns] applies the result o f this inquiry to various departments o f traditional philosophv, showing in each case how traditional philosophy and traditional solutions arise out o f ignorance o f the principles o f symbolism and out o f misuse o f language. (Russell 1922. p. i.\) This view is expressed in Tractatns 4.003: most o f the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions o f this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical. Most o f the propositions and questions o f philosophers arise from our failure to understand logic o f our language. (They belong to the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all. (Wittgenstein 1921. p. 19) Wittgenstein's later change o f v iew is often represented as a rejection of the Tractatns in light o f the development o f an entirely new philosophy. This is not entirely correct. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. however. W hile Wittgenstein did reject some o f the views developed in the Tractatns. he did not reject the views that philosophy has essentially to do with language and that philosophical problems arise out o f a misuse o f language. The differences between his early and later views have to do with relatively specific issues in the philosopln o f language: in his later philosophy Wittgenstein rejected the Tractatns view that language works on the model o f object and name: meaning is taken to depend on use. rather than reference. This does not constitute a metaphilosophical difference except at a fairly specific level, insofar as his understanding o f linguistic analysis is revised. In the Iractains. linguistic analysis is logical analysis: the translation o f ordinary-language sentences into a logical notation whose grammatical structure is supposed to reveal the ontological structure o f the ‘'fact" spoken about. In his later philosophy, linguistic analysis is a matter o f looking at how language is ordinarily used and seeing that traditional philosophical problems arise only as we depart from that use. Philosophical problems, he sav s. are ... not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings o f our language, and that in such a wav as to make us recognize its workings: ... The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known [i.e.. what is given in language as ordinarily used]. (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 47. r 109) Philosophy was still to be a critique of language; but it was no longer to he a logical critique o f ordinary language. Instead, it was to be a critique o f traditional philosophical language. ''Philosophy." Wittgenstein said, "is a battle against the bewitchment o f our intelligence by means o f language" (ibid.). Traditional philosophers, having fallen prey to the tricks o f language, went round and round bewitching and being bewitched. By Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. contrast, "u lia t tie [the new philosophers] do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (ibid. p. 48. c 1 i 6); "the results o f [the new] philosophy are the uncovering o f one or another piece o f plain nonsense and o f bumps that the understanding has gotten by running its head up against the limits o f language" (ibid.. c I 19). So. in his later philosophy. Wittgenstein changed his mind about what language is. the way it works, and how it ought to be “ analyzed" for the purpose o f solving philosophical problems: but he did not waver in maintaining that linguistic analysis was the proper method for resolving philosophical problems. Both Wittgenstein's earlier and later views are at home in the metaphilosophical milieu o f the linguistic turn. So. W ittgenstein accepted the linguistic thesis: and. as we have seen, the linguistic thesis itself was custom-made to be a scientistic solution to a scientistic crisis. But did Wittgenstein accept scientism? There is ample evidence to suggest that he did. fo r example, there is a strong scientistic sentiment in Tniclutus 4.11: "The totality o f true propositions is the whole o f natural science (or the whole corpus o f the natural sciences)” (W ittgenstein 1921. p. 25): and again in 6.53: The correct method in philosophy would really be the follow ing: to say nothing except what can be said. i.e. propositions o f natural science— i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy— and then always, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions, (ibid.. pp. 73 f.) Having laid this scientistic foundation. Wittgenstein develops a view o f philosophy's relation to science that is best described as positiv istic: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4.1 II Philosophy is not one o f the natural sciences. (The word ■philosophy' must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.) (Wittgenstein 1921. p. 25) 4.112 Philosophy aims at the logical clarification o f thoughts. Philosophy is not a body o f doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially o f clarifications. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification o f propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are. as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sure boundaries, (ibid.) 4.113 Philosophy sets lim its to the much disputed sphere o f natural science, (ibid.) 4.114 It must set lim its to what can be thought: and. in doing so. to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards to what can be thought, (ibid.) 4.1 15 It w ill signify what cannot be said. bv presenting clearlv what can be said. ( ibid.. p. 26) Clearly, this view o f the relation o f philosophy to science tits the model o f positivism established by Comte and m odified in the British context by Lewes. As we have seen, the general tendency o f positivism is not to absolutely do away with philosophy (though this seems to be what Hodgson's "English Positivists" wanted), but rather to redefine it in such a wav that it is relegated to the status o f a handmaiden to the sciences. In this wav philosophv remains "scientific” by association, but it is not itse lf a field o f knowledge."' This positivistic tendency appears also in W ittgenstein's later philosophv. fo r example, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein insists that, as philosophers, "w e may not advance any kind o f theory. There must not be anything hvpothetical in our In terms o f Hodgson's four main ways of drawing the distinction between philosophv and science. Wittgenstein most resembles Lewes, according to whom, as we have seen, philosophv- was to coordinate the findings of the sciences while keeping out anv unwanted concepts or entities. The main difference is Wittgenstein's linguistic approach. W hile Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place ( \\ ittgenstein 1953. p. 47. c 109). This is exactly in line with the positivist program o f establishing inductive laws by observation without attempting to explain the regularities upon which those inductions are based. Positivism is. o f course, a scientistic philosophy: and. by being positivistic. Wittgenstein served the needs o f scientism. Another respect in which Wittgenstein's philosophy in the Tractatns served the needs o f scientism was in the em piricistic interpretation to which it easily lent itself. In the first place, scientism itself implies empiricism. But also, there are passages which seem to deny the possibility, o f u p rio ri know ledge, e.g.. 2.225: "There are no pictures that are true a priori" ( Wittgenstein 1 9 2 1. p. 2.173). Taken in combination with W ittgenstein's view that propositions are a kind o f picture, this seems to imply that no propositions could be true a p rio ri: and the denial o f synthetic it p rio ri knowledge is at the heart o f empiricism." Wittgenstein's empiricistic tendencies remained with him in his later philosophy. They are discernible in numerous passages; for example, in the well-known injunction: "don’t think, but look!" (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 31. c 66). Indeed, the subject matter o f Wittgenstein's later philosophy— viz.. ordinary language— is something that could not be approached any way other than empirically . As Wittgenstein say s, "one cannot guess how I.ewes expelled things from the realm o f the knowable on the basis o f their being "m etem pirical." Wittgenstein expelled statements on the basis o f their being meaningless. ' "The fundamental thesis o f modern empiricism consists in deny ing the possibility o f synthetic a priori knowledge" (Hahn. Neurath, and Camap. 1929. quoted in M urzi 2000). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 160 a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that" (ibid.. p. 109. r 340). W ittgenstein's scientistic tendencies are also apparent in the so-called "private language argument" (hereafter "P L A "). which is commonly regarded as a centerpiece o f the Philosophical Investigations. On the traditional view, the PLA purports to show that we cannot make meaningful statements about private objects, like sensations or ideas, etc.. because such statements cannot be verified empirically. This interpretation has been challenged, but it is not w ithout at least prima facie support in the text. Wittgenstein introduces the concept o f a private language in r 243. characterizing it as: a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences— his feelings, moods, and the rest— for his private use....[one in which] the individual words ... refer to what can only be known to the person speaking: to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language. (Wittgenstein 1953. p. S8) In r 244. Wittgenstein raises what seems to be a, if not the. central issue for the PLA. I shall call this the connection issue. He asks, with respect to a public language: "How do words refer to sensations? ... How is the connexion between name and thing set up'.’." and he asserts that "This question is the same as: how does a human being learn the names o f sensations?— o f the word "pain" for example" (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 89). Wittgenstein takes this occasion to introduce his theory that linguistic behavior (e.g.. say ing "I am in pain") serves as a surrogate for "prim itive, natural expressions" o f sensation (e.g.. cry ing), so that in learning to employ the words for sensations, we learn a "new pain-behaviour." So. in a public language, the connection o f w ord to sensation is identical to the connection between prim itive natural expression and sensation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In c 256. the connection issue is raised with respect to a pri\ate language. A private language is supposed to be necessarily private; therefore, because W ittgenstein takes our prim itive expressions o f sensations to be. so to speak, the conditions o f the possibility o f public sensation-language. the connection between word and object in private sensation-language cannot involve these prim itive expressions. With this possibility removed, he begins to investigate the possibility that bare association might establish the connection between word and object; "... suppose I didn't have any natural expressions o f sensation, but only had the sensation? And now I simply associate names w ith sensations and use these names in descriptions" (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 91). This investigation is developed in c 258. where he imagines keeping a record o f the recurrence o f a particular sensation: “ To this end I associate it [the sensation| with the sign "L " and write this sign in a calendar for every day on w hich I have the sensation" (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 92). But how is the connection between word/sign and sensation established'.’ Wittgenstein suggests that the only way to do this is by an act o f private ostensive definition— a simultaneous concentration o f attention on the sensation and the word. But this method o f establishing the connection is. for W ittgenstein, problematic; ...in this way I impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation.— But 'I impress it on m yself can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion o f correctness. One would like to say; whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right'. (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 9 2 .c 258) This worry about having a criterion o f correctness becomes the main subject o f a long digression, which runs from *1 259 to c 268. I shall call this the verification issue. On the traditional interpretation o f the PLA. the verification issue is an epistemologieal Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 162 problem: it is possible that a private language user might use an expression correctly, but he cannot know whether he has.‘s On this interpretation. Wittgenstein is taken to hold that public criteria have some superiority over private criteria. In a public language, criteria for judging whether or not a word has been used correctly are provided in the behavior o f other people. If I mis-remember the connection between word and object, and so misuse the word, others w ill respond to me in a way that w ill clue me in to the fact that 1 have misused the word, and this type o f criteria is acceptable to Wittgenstein. Such a set o f beltav ioristic criteria is not present in a private language, thus we cannot be sure that our use is correct. There is good prim a facie support for this interpretation in the text o f the f ’hilo.sophical Investigations. For one thing. Wittgenstein does seem to be concerned with the epistemological problem (though that may not be a ll he is concerned w ith). In r 265. lor example, he gives the case o f a person who. being uncertain that he has correctly remembered the departure time o f a train, attempts to verify his memory bv calling to mind an image o f the published train schedule. But how does he know that that memory is correct? Wittgenstein compares this practice o f checking memory against memory to having "several copies o f the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true" (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 94). The problem, it seems, is that to do this is to beg the question. The uncertainty that attaches to the first memory also attaches to the second, thus it cannot serv e as a criterion o f correctness, thus we are left seeking the principle. In r 269 W ittgenstein introduces the notion that, in a public language, there are behavioral criteria for a person's ( I) understanding. (2) misunderstanding, or (3) "s As compared w ith Kripke's interpretation (Kripke 1982). according to which the verification issue is ontological: there simply is no criterion o f correct use in a private language. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. mistakenly believing him self to understand, a word. The notion o f behavioral criteria is essentially involved in Wittgenstein's theory o f meaning. Though Wittgenstein does not explicitly say so. it seems to me that w 270 is meant to illustrate this. Returning to our imagined case o f record-keeping in a private language. Wittgenstein gives "E " a use. Me imagines that the sensation for which "E " stands corresponds w ith a rise in hlood-prossure. and this rise can be measured by a manometer. Under these conditions. Wittgenstein savs: ...I shall be able to say that my blood pressure is rising without using anv apparatus. This is a useful result. And now it seems quite indifferent whether I have recognized the sensation right or not. Let us suppose I regularly identity it wrong, it does not matter in the least. And that alone shows that the hypothesis that I make a mistake is mere show. (We as it were turned a knob which looked as if it could be used to turn on part o f the machine, but it was a mere ornament, not connected with the mechanism at all.) (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 95) It is onlv when the word is appropriately related to some publicly accessible (i.e.. empirical) phenomenon toward which public practices can be directed that a word has meaning, and can be correctly or incorrectly employed and responded to. etc. And. o f course, on Wittgenstein's view, these are necessary conditions o f language. This is made clearer in c 271. where Wittgenstein imagines a person who meets the behavioral criteria for understanding the word "pain." but who (privately'.’ ) does not understand the word— he constantly forgets its meaning so that he "constantly calls different things by that name" (Wittgenstein 1953. p.95). With regard to this situation, he makes the follow ing comment: "A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves is not part o f the mechanism" (ibid.). What the wheel and the mechanism are meant to stand for are not made explicit: however, given the point that Wittgenstein ultimately wants to make— v iz.. that private sensations do not play a part in the language-game— it seems Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 164 reasonable to assume that he means the wheel to stand for whatever prhate meanings this fellow associates w ith the word "pain.'' and that the mechanism stands for the life o f the linguistic community, in w hich, as far as we can know, this fellow is participating. In c 290 the import o f these examples (the knob in *i 269. and the wheel in r 271) becomes clearer. It reads, in part: "What I do is not. o f course, to identify my sensation by criteria: but to repeat an expression. But this is not the end o f the language game: it is the beginning" (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 99). The utterance o f the expression is the beginning o f the language game, therefore whatever comes prior to the utterance (e.g.. the sensation, the (mis-) recognition o f a sensation, etc.) is not a part o f the language game, just as the sensation for which "E ” stood did not enter into the language game even after ” E" was given a use. The behavioral interaction continues as if. we might say. the sensation was there and had been correctly recognized, whether or not it in fact has been. This is the point o f the famous "beetle in the box" example in r 293: " i f we construe the grammar o f the expression o f sensation on the model o f 'object and name' the object drops out o f consideration as irrelevant" (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 1 0 0 )/' This is the first (though not necessarilv the only) conclusion o f the PLA. It is re-stated in c 304: "The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said” ( ibid.. p. 102). So. traditional interpretation o f the PLA is not without a basis in the text. Furthermore, one can see why. on the basis o f the above issues, a person might think Wittgenstein was committed to empiricism, and possibly even to materialistic "' This assertion o f irrelev ance is also given in c 270 & r 2 7 1. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 165 behaviorism.'1 ' And. o f course, both o f these views are highly amenable to positivism and scientism, indications o f which we have already seen in Wittgenstein's philosophv. Granted. Wittgenstein also says things that seem to indicate that he is not really committed to scientism, em piricism , behaviorism, and so on. But these are the vers things which make W ittgenstein so obscure. It is the scientistic line that stands out most clearly as forming an identifiable systematic philosophy, and it is not clear what alternative to the scientistic views he would adopt. Certainly, in the intellectual context in which he lived and worked, the scientistic, empiricistic. and behavioristic elements in his philosophv would have appeared to most as constituting a systematic, scientistic philosophy. A. J. A yer records that this is precisely what happened to Wittgenstein, fo r example, he recalls that the mystical elements in the True tut m were disregarded by- Wittgenstein's early readers and he was categorized as a Humean empiricist. The theory o f meaning developed in the True tat its depends upon the existence o f vvhat Wittgenstein calls simples or objects: for. ultimately, it is reference to these that gives names, and hence propositions, meaning. The nature o f simples, however, is not made clear in the Tractatns. with the result that, as Ayer observed, "we are frustrated by our not knowing even what sort o f objects are in question or what is the criterion o f their sim plicity'' (A yer 1982. p. 114). But. he goes on to point out, this was not a problem when the Tractatns first appeared because most every one assumed that simples were bits o f sense-data: This frustration was not felt by the earliest recruits to Wittgenstein's standard. They took for granted that the elementary propositions o f the Tractatns were descriptions o f sense-experience; the objects which they signified were vvhat Russell and Moore had made it fashionable to call '" Though Wittgenstein is clearly not a behaviorist in any ordinary sense: cf. * c 28I-2S7. especially * 285^& c 286. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 166 sense-data: their configurations made up the structure o f sense-fields. The result uas that Wittgenstein was credited with a philosophical standpoint hardly different from Hume's. His states o f affairs, whether simple or compound, correspond to Hume's matters o f fact: his tautologies and identities expressed Hume's relations o f ideas. They agreed that these two categories exhausted everything that could significantly be said. Not onlv that, but Wittgenstein also seemed to share Hume's attitude to causality, asserting, as he did. that 'the procedure o f induction... has no logical justification but only a psychological one' [Tractatns 6.363-6.363 11. and that 'there is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity' [Tractatns 6.37J . (ibid.) So. Wittgenstein was taken to be a Humean, and thus to be working in the line o f Bacon. Ilobbes. L.ocke. Berkeley. Hume. Hartley, and the M ills— the scientistic line in British philosophical thought which Ribot had called "a much wider positivism ." And. indeed, classifying Wittgenstein as a positivist, as I have done here, is not an entirely new thing. Ayer, for example, characterizes Wittgenstein's move from his earlier \ ieus as a matter o f modification w ithin an overarching positivism: "lie himself [W ittgenstein) modified the rigors o f his early positivism to an extent that can be measured by comparing the Tractatns with his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations: ..." (Aver I959. p. 5). Also. Cap described the Wittgensteinian faction o f Analytic Philosophv as "therapeutic positivists" (Pap 1949, p. x)— therapeutic because their aim was to alleviate the malaise o f philosophv ("M y aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece o f disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense" (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 133. r 464); positivists because they believed that philosophical problems had no merit in themselves, but were to be dissolved by describing, rather than explaining, the way bits o f language are actually used, "by looking into the workings o f our language... in such a wav as to make us recognize its Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 167 workings." and. having recognized this, by "bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use." B. Logical Positivism Logical Positivism, as its name implies, is a scientistic philosophy-. I w ill lim it the following discussion to four main features o f Logical Positivism which amplv demonstrate this: its historical connection to philosophy in the scientistic line, the verification theory o f meaning, physicalism. and the Inpothesis o f the unity o f science. In its 1929 manifesto "The Vienna Circle— It's Scientific World-Conccption." the Vienna Circle explicitly named Hume. Comte. M ill, and Avenarius— all o f whom, we have seen, were caught up in the modern drive toward scientism— as philosophical forebears. These were not their onlv forebears, however. Their extensive list included philosophers from Hpicurus to Liebniz to Marx and Russell.- 1 What all o f these figures have in ' Nicolas Capaldi has recently drawn attention to the connections between Logical Positivism and the French philosophcs (Capaldi 2000). Capaldi's book is called The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation. He defines the enlightenment project as the attempt to define and explain the human predicament through science as well as to achieve mastery over it through the use o f a social technology" (Capaldi 2000. p. 17). Quoting Isaiah Berlin, he locates the first full-fledged instance o f the enlightenment project in the work o f the philosophcs: ... there were certain beliefs that were more or less common to the entire party o f progress and civ ilization, and this is vvhat makes it proper to speak o f it as a single movement. These were, in effect, the conviction that the world, or nature, was a single whole, subject to a single set o f laws, in principle discoverable by the intelligence o f man: the laws w hich gov erned inanimate nature were in principle the same as those which governed plants, animals and sentient beings: that man was capable o f improv ement: that there existed certain objectively recognizable human goals which all men. rightly so describe, sought after, viz.. happiness, knowledge, justice, liberty, and what was somewhat vaguely described but well understood as virtue: that these goals were common to all men as such, were not Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 168 common is amenability, in one respect or other, to scientism. As Ayer observes: "Liebniz is included for his logic, not for his metaphysics: Karl Marx is included neither for his logic nor his metaphysics but for his scientific approach to history." (A yer 1929. p. 4). and so on. In standard positivistic fashion, the Logical Positivists relegated philosophy to a position o f subservience to science. According to the Vienna Circle's chief luminary. Rudolf Carnap: In order to discover the correct standpoint o f the philosopher, which differs from that o f the empirical investigator, we must not penetrate behind the objects o f empirical science into presumably some kind o f transcendant lev el: on the contrary we must take a step hack and take seience its e lf as the object. Philosophy is the theory o f science.... (Carnap 1934. p. 54). Philosophy deals with science only from the logical view point. Philosophy is the logic o f science, i.e.. the logical analysis o f the concepts, propositions, proofs, theories o f science, as w ell as o f those which we select in available science as common to the possible methods o f constructing concepts, proofs, hy potheses, theories." (Carnap 1934. p. 55). unattainable, nor incompatible, and that human misery , vice and folly were mainly due to ignorance either o f what these goals consisted in or o f the means o f attaining them— ignorance due in turn to insufficient know ledge o f laws o f nature... consequently, the discovery o f general laws that governed human behavior, their clear and logical integration into scientific systems— o f psychology, sociology , economics, political science and the like ... and the determination o f their proper place in the great corpus o f knowledge that covered all discoverable facts, would, by replacing the chaotic amalgam o f guess work, tradition, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy and 'interested error' that hitherto did serv ice as human know ledge and human wisdom.... create a new. sane, rational, happy, just and self- perpetuating human society , which, having arrived at the peak o f attainable perfection, would preserve itself against all hostile influences, save those o f nature (Berlin 1993. pp. 27 f„ quoted in Capaldi 2000. pp. 17 f.) Capaldi argues— successfully in my view— that the enlightenment project became a formative part o f the Analytic tradition through the Logical Positiv ists, and that scientism, understood as "the view that physical science is the ultimate framework for understanding everything including science itself." is "the fundamental presupposition o f the Enlightenment Project w ithin analytic philosophy" (Capaldi 2000 p. 41). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I6 ‘) More specifically. Carnap took philosophy to be “ the formal structure theory o f the language o f science.... the logical syntax o f the language o f science." (Carnap 1934. p. 56). W hat motivated this unlikely view o f philosophy was. it seems, the promise it held lor a scientistic philosophy, on the one hand, and for a new argument against traditional metaphysics. on the other. Carnap him self was outspokenly scientistic: "since science in principle can say all that can be said, there is no unanswerable question left" (Carnap 1963. p. 38). He had been strongly influenced by Russell: "whereas Frege had the strongest influence on me in the fields o f logic and semantics." he acknowledged, “ in my , ' 1 , ' cal thinking in general I learned most from Bertrand Russell” (Carnap 1963. p. 13). One o f the most important events in Carnap's intellectual development came when he read the follow ing statement from Russell: the study o f logic becomes essential study in philosophy: it gives the method o f research in philosophy just as mathematics gives the method in physics... [we seek the| creation o f a school o f men with scientific training... unhampered by the traditions o f the past, and not misled by the literary methods o f those who copy the ancients in all but their merits. (Russell 1914c. p.) I pon reading these words. Carnap recalls. "I felt as if this appeal had been directed to me personally" (Carnap 1963. p. 13). In 1926. Carnap joined the Vienna Circle, a group he hoped would constitute the kernel o f the very school Russell had called for. Positivism, o f course, had always been opposed to metaphysics o f a traditional sort. However, as Ayer points out in the first chapter o f Language Truth and Logic, the traditional sort o f argument for the impossibility o f metaphysics always seemed to presuppose a metaphysics o f its own. " I f it is possible to know only what lies within the bounds o f sense-e.xperience." Ayer asks. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9995 170 [how can the critic o f metaphysics] tell w hat are the boundaries beyond which the human understanding may not venture, unless lie succeeds in passing them himself. As Wittgenstein says. 'in order to draw a lim it to thinking, we should have to think both sides o f this lim it.' [W ittgenstein 1922. p. 3| a truth to which Bradley gives a special twist in maintaining that the man who is ready to prove that metaphysics is impossible is a brother metaphysician w ith a theory o f his own. (Ayer 1952. p. 34) The traditional sort o f argument relied upon setting lim its for human understanding: but this seemed to require that the critic o f traditional metaphysics should have some theory as to the nature o f the mind, the faculty o f understanding. Such a theory would hav e to be metaphysical, the product oft/ p rio ri reasoning: for. since Locke, it had been generally accepted that the nature o f substance did not fall within the scope o f the senses. The Logical Positivists thought they had found a way to prove the impossibility o f metaphysics without presupposing a rival metaphysical theory o f their own. for they did not attempt to set a lim it to lim it thought, but to meaning. Language and meaning, they supposed, were less problematic than mind and understanding, for they believed that meaning had been shown to be empirical, and language merely symbolic. This "realization"' is what Schlick called "the turning point in philosophy." In a 1930 paper by that name. Schlick described the turning point as an "insight into the nature o f logic itself.” v iz.. the insight that "every cognition is an expression or representation. That is. it expresses a fact which is cognized in it" (Schlick 1930. p. 55). The expression o f a fact, according to Schlick. is a matter o f symbolic representation, and this can be accomplished by means o f any arbitrary sy stem o f signs. W hat any set o f signs expressing the same fact has in common is their logical form. What is essential to a piece o f know ledge, i.e.. what makes a given piece o f know ledge what it is. is its logical form: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 171 A ll these possible modes o f representation— if they otherwise actually expressed the same knowledge— must have something in common: and what is common to them is their logical form. So all knowledge is such only by virtue o f its form. It is through its form that it represents the fact known, (ibid.) The form is something that is hud by representations, but it cannot itself be represented. It. according to Schlick. can only be shown: bestowing meaning upon statements [i.e.. showing their form| cannot be done in turn by statements. For if. say. 1 give the meaning o f my words through explanatory statements and definitions, that is by help o f other words, one must ask further for the meaning o f these words, and so 0 1 1. This process cannot proceed endlessly. It always comes to an end in actual pointings, in exhibiting what is meant, thus in real acts: only these acts are no longer capable of, or in need of. further explanation. The final giving o f meaning always takes place therefore, through deeds. (Schlick 1930. p. 57) "It is these deeds or acts." according to Schlick. "which constitute philosophical a ctivity." Insofar as this is Schlick's conception o f philosophy, it would seem to leave room for something like Husserlian Phenomenology. According to Husserl's student Adolph Reinach. phenomenology was ultimately a »</v o f seeing, and phenomenological description was a way o f leading others to see by describing to them a route to the perspective you wish to share with them (cf. Reinach 1914). Both phenomenological seeing and describing (showing) are acts: but they are cognitive acts, and Schlick was adamant that "'with this showing [i.e.. philosophical showing], cognition has nothing to do" (Schlick 1930. p. 57). Indeed, Schlick says that "the great contemporary turning point is characterized by the fact that w e see in philosophy not a sy stem o f cognitions, but a sy stem Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. o f acfx: philosophy is that activ ity through which the meaning o f statements is revealed or determined" (Schlick 1930. p. 56). This distinction between cognition and act is not quite clear. Whether we take them to be expressions, as Schlick did. or mental acts, as would be more usual, cognitions can be construed as acts. So. by "ac»." Schlick must mean a particular kind o f act that is not a cognition, and thus not an expression. Given other statements he makes, it is clear that the kind o f act he has in mind involves having a sense-experience: so it seems that philosophical activity consists in leading people to have sense-experiences. " Indeed, the only kind ol shouing-act that counted for the Logical positivists was empirical showing: wherever there is a meaningful problem one can in theory always give the path that leads to its solution. For it becomes ev ident that giv ing this path coincides with the indication o f its meaning. ... The act o f verification in which the path to the solution finally ends is always o f the same sort: it is the occurrence o f a definite fact that is confirmed by observation, by means o f immediate experience. In this manner the truth (or fa lsity) of everv statement, o f daily life or science, is determined. There is thus no other testing and corroboration o f truths except through observation and empirical science. (Schlick 1930. p. 56) Cleariv. this presupposes an analysis o f experience according to which experience is merely empirical. On the basis o f these views, the Logical Positivists developed what would be their primary weapon in the fight against traditional metaphysics: the verification principle. According to the verification principle, a statement has meaning i f and only if it can be ' Is it Johnson who is famous for offering to prov e to Berkeley that material objects exists by hitting him with something? Perhaps this is a philosophical thing to do after all. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. empirically ve rilied ." Given this view o f meaning, the statements o f traditional metaphysics turn out to be meaningless, the results o f grammatical error. Though it was initially taken to be Logical Positivism's strongest weapon, it soon became clear that the verification principle was fatally Hawed. first, it seemed to be self-refuting, for the principle itself was not empirically \erifiable. As a result, it was meaningless and "metaphysical.” This result was acceptable to Wittgenstein who. in the Tractatus. admitted that a proper understanding o f the propositions o f the Tractatus invokes recognition that those very propositions were nonsensical. This contributed to the element o f mysticism in W ittgenstein’ s philosophy which the Logical Positivists wanted to avoid. So. for them, the im verifiability o f the verification principle was a real problem. One way o f saving the verification principle, suggested by Ayer (A yer I l)5h, pp. 15 f.). is to treat it as a conventional definition o f meaning based on empirical observation, i.e.. as a descriptive definition. However, as Ayer notes, in order for it to be o f use to the Logical Positivists in their battle against metaphysical statements, it had to be prescriptse. "W hy." he asks, "should this prescription be accepted?" The most that has been proved [ if we treat the verification principle as a descriptive principle based on induction] is that metaphysical statements do not fall into the same category as the laws o f logic, or as scientific hy potheses, or as historical narratives, or judgments o f perception, or any other common sense descriptions o f the 'natural' world. Surely it does not follow that they are neither true nor false, still less that they are nonsensical? No. it does not follow. Or rather, it does not follow unless one makes it follow . The question is whether one thinks the difference " The empirical bias remained in place even as the verification principle was replaced w ith the falsification principle, and later with principles o f confirmation and discontinuation. In every case it was always em pirical verification/falsification/confirmation.discontinuation that was in question. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 174 between metaphysical and common sense or scientific statements to be sufficiently sharp for it to be useful to underline it in this «a\. (A \e r 1959. pp. 15 f.) The Logical Positivists did believe that there was a sharp distinction between metaphysical statements and common sense or scientific statements: but. to make this belief a ground for the principle o f verification rather than its consequence would be to reveal a metaphysical bias in favor o f what m ight be called naturalistic statements, i.e.. statements referring to natural (in the sense o f inm-lransccndant or nan-metaphysical) entities. This was not an option for the Logical Positivists, for. as positivists, they were not supposed to be doing metapin sics. ' 1 ' ‘ Nonetheless. Nagel believed that the similarities o f tendency among Moore. W ittgenstein, the members o f the Vienna Circle, and his group o f Polish philosophers could be explained in terms o f similarity o f fundamental beliefs at the lex el o f we/tanschauungen. First, he believed that "[these figures and groups] take for granted a body o f authentic knowledge acquired by the special sciences, and are concerned not with adding to it in the way research in the sciences adds to it. but with clarifying its meaning and implications" (Nagel 1936a. p. 6). So. on Nagel's view at least. the\ were united in that attitude o f deference to science which is at least a tendency tow ard scientism. Properly speaking, scientism is an epistemological theory; but it can (and. from the perspective o f traditional philosophy, it must) be taken to have ontological implications. Thus. Nagel felt that all these figures were committed to naturalism as well: What pertains to a common doctrine, the men to whom I refer subscribe to a comrnon-sense naturalism. They do not believe that the even,day world is an illusion, or that science or philosophy reveal a contrasting reality. They accept as a matter of course the mechanisms which science progressively discovers.... (ibid.. p. 7) Nagel is careful to note that these are not "explicitly formulated doctrines, but rather what 1 take to be pre-doctrinal tenets. For ... any Weltanschauung such as the one 1 am indicating would never be asserted by these men as a formal part o f their philosophy" (ibid., pp. 7 f.). The idea that there were "pre-doctrinal tenets" involved in early Analytic Philosophy is crucial to the case for the existence o f an Analytic Weltanschauung. One o f the most distinctive features o f early Analytic Philosophy was its denial that it subscribed to any general metaphysical view, the likes o f w hich naturalism certainly is. I hope the foregoing chapters have made clear, however, that general metaplnsical and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Second, there arose problems concerning the nature o f the elementary or atomic statements upon which the possibility o f verification ultimately depended. The Logical Positivists accepted the Wittgensteinian view that all meaningful statements were or could be broken down into elementary or atomic statements which corresponded to em pirically observable atomic facts, which were themselves composed o f simples. As I noted in the discussion o f Wittgenstein, the simples o f the Tractatus were usually- taken by its readers to be bits o f sense-data. This is just as true o f the Viennese positivists, in whose immediate background were Mach's analyses o f experience in terms o f sensations, as it was o f Wittgenstein's British readers, for whom sense-data was made the obvious choice by Moore and Russell. Atom ic facts, being made up o f simples, were taken to be epistemological views o f the Weltanschauung variety were embedded in both the explicitly formulated methodological doctrines o f early Analytic Philosophy and in Analytic practice, in the sense that the these views are explanatory o f the method or practice. This is what is meant In attaching the prefix "methodological" to the name of a given medical or epistemological view. For example. Rorty has noted that "methodological nom inalism " was prevalent among linguistic philosophers: methodological nominalism is the view that all the questions which philosophers have asked about concepts, subsistent universals. or 'natures' which (a) cannot be answered by empirical inquiry concerning the behavior or properties o f particulars subsumed under such concepts, universals or natures, and which (b) can be answered in some w a y can be answered by answering questions about the use o f linguistic expressions, and in no other way. (Rorty 1967b. p. 11) Rorty goes on to note that " it is probably true that no one who was not a methodological nominalist would be a linguistic philosopher, and it is also true that methodological nominalism is a substantive philosophical thesis. Here. then, we have a presupposition o f linguistic philosophy..." (ibid.). It seems to me that this is not the only presupposition o f linguistic philosophy, and that we find in many instances what might be called methodological empiricism, methodological scientism, methodological naturalism, methodological phenomenalism, methodological materialism, and so on. alongside the methodological nominalism. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 176 'complexes'' (though irreducible complexes) o f sense-data as well. Grounding meaning in the objects o f private experience, however, created a problem for the intersubjective objectivity o f meaning, and especially the meaning o f scientific propositions. As Russell put it: Physics exhibits sense-data as functions o f physical objects, but verification is only possible if physical objects can be exhibited as functions o f sense data. We have therefore to solve the equations giving sense-data in terms o f physical objects so as to make them instead give- physical objects in terms o f sense-data. (Russell 1914b. pp. 146 f.) I he problem, essentially, was the traditional philosophical problem of solipsism, which is created by the kind o f representationalism that has traditionally been a part o f British Empiricism: if one has access only to one's own representations (ideas, sensations, etc.). Iiovv can one rightfully accept that there is anything beyond one's own representations? In linguistic terms, the problem was that if the meaning o f any expression I may make is a private object, then no one else can know the meaning o f my expression (assuming there are other people who m ight try to understand my expressions). Attempts were made by Logical Positivists and others to show how the world o f science and intersubjective meaning could be "constructed" out o f sense-data." but. these were generally regarded as having failed. Perhaps the most thorough attempt was Carnap's, which he spelled out in The Logical Structure o f the W orld (Carnap 1928). The progress o f Carnap’s thought on this problem is very revealing, for. when he came to regard his project in The Logical Structure o f the W orld as hav ing failed, his response was to change his " See. for example, Russell 1914b. Carnap 1928. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. views on atomic statements, to treat them as i f they referred directly to physical objects. " I his reveals that the essential core o f Carnap's position, which he wanted to maintain at all costs, was scientism: for this change o f view was nothing but an ad hoc solution to the problem tor the sole purpose o f maintaining the scientistic outlook. Finally. the Logical Positivists maintained the thesis o f the units o f science. According to Carnap, "the unity o f science... thesis must be understood prim arily as a rejection o f the... view... that there is a fundamental difference between the natural sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften [i.e.. the humanities]..." (ibid.. p. 52). The attempt to treat the humanities as empirical sciences was. as w e have seen, a consequence o f the scientistic drive. The view that elementary statements refer to physical objects— which was adopted not only by Carnap but also by Neurath— has been called physicalism. It stood behind the theory o f the same name in the philosophy o f mind. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 178 6. Scientism in the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy 2: Creating the Illusion of Unity (i. I Mefaphilosophical anil Metaphysical Differences Antony Core Analytic Figures M y aim in this chapter is to demonstrate that scientism was a major force not only in sowing the seeds o f Analytic Philosophy, but also in superintending its growth. The general contours o f Analytic Philosophy's development from the beginning o f the twentieth century onward are fairly well-known. The main phases o f its development are. as 1 see it: (1) Moore and Russell's break with the school o f British idealism and their concomitant development o f analysis as a philosophical method. (2) Russell's development o f an analytic method involving the techniques o f formal logic, and a philosophical system (logical atomism) to explain it. (4) Wittgenstein's early work in the Tractatus. in which the linguistic conception o f philosophy is first clearly enunciated, and the development and popularization o f that view by the Logical Positivists. (5) the rise o f O rdinary Language philosophy, stemming from the work o f the later Wittgenstein. Austin, etc.. and (6) the post-linguistic phase, ushered in mainly by the inability to find a self- consistent formulation o f the verification principle, on the one hand, and Quine's criticism s, on the other. This last phase began around I960 and runs all the wav up to the present. I shall not give much space here to tracing these contours, nor w ill I give much space to explaining the details o f the doctrines o f Logical Atomism. Logical Positivism. Wittgensteinianism, etc.. except insofar as may be necessary to understand the development o f the illusion o f Analytic Philosophy's unity . M y justification for this is Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 179 tiiat. 011 the one hand, these things are fairly well-known, and. on the other, there is available to anyone who does not already know them, in addition to the primary sources, a plethora o f secondary literature through which one can easily acquaint one's self with these details (e.g.. Ayer 1963. 1971. 1982: Biletzki and Matar 1998: Charlton 1991; Clarke 1997; Corrado 1975: Hacker 1998. 1997; Hylton 1990: Urmson 1956. Wamock 1958. etc.). As I said in the Introduction, there are many perfectly good expositions o f this or that person, school, or group. What is lacking in the contemporary literature is a work that enables one to see these separate influences as one united confluence, to see how these distinct forces are related, and. particularly, how they complemented each other in bringing about the "revolution in philosophy." But now. I have proposed that the revolution was an illusion, and along with it the development o f a m onolithic school o f Analy tic Philosophy : and the reason for this is that these various factions have turned out not to complement each other very well at all. Indeed, the rise o f Analytic Philosophy was not merely a matter o f formulating a new answer to the problem o f the scientific status o f philosophy . As I argued in chapter 2. it also involved an element o f illusion. Specifically, in $ 2.6. I argued ( I) that Analytic Philosophy's original illusory unity was grounded in the mistaken view that all early, canonical Analytic philosophers accepted the linguistic thesis, and (2) that, in order to understand the true nature o f Analytic Philosophy, we must find the real philosophical phenomena behind this mistaken view. Relative to these facts. I may characterize my present aim differently. At the beginning o f this section. I said my aim was to demonstrate that scientism was a major force in superintending the growth o f Analytic Philosophy. Giv en that no school actually grew, but only an illusion o f a school. I can say that my aim Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 180 is to show how scientism was the real philosophical phenomenon behind the illusion o f Analytic Philosophy's unity. In short. I w ill try to show that, in the case o f Moore and Russell— two philosophers who. throughout the history of Analytic Philosophy, have generally been thought o f as patriarchs o f the school— it is possible to interpret them as having accepted the linguistic thesis only i f one focuses on certain aspects o f their views that are amenable to scientism while disregarding aspects which are not. As a preliminary step in developing this view. I must show that Moore and Russell actually did not accept the linguistic thesis. I w ill do this by drawing attention to what I just referred to as the non-scientistic aspects o f their views, those that, on my view, have to be ignored in order to read them as supporting the linguistic thesis. The linguistic thesis involves the views that ( I) the only legitimate philosophical enterprise is analysis.' and (2) the only legitimate type o f philosophical analysis is linguistic analysis. Moore and Russell each denied both o f these components. Their respective denials o f ( I ) consist in affirming metaphilosophicai theses contrarv to the linguistic thesis. Their denial o f (2) turns on a matter o f metaphysics, viz.. the nature o f philosophical ana/vsani/a. I shall discuss each in turn. Peter Hylton has recently challenged the coherence o f the view that philosophy could be only analytic: the idea o f analysis itself gets us nowhere until we put constraints on the process. ... Both the vindication o f the process, and the constraints to be put on it. must be the result o f philosophical thought. They are presuppositions o f the process o f philosophical analysis, and cannot themselves be justified by appeal to it. Whatever else philosophical analysis may be. it cannot be a starling point for philosophy (Hylton 11%. p. 213*) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ISI -I. M e tap Ii Has op h icai Differences For both Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists, philosophy was to be a whollv analytic enterprise: but this is not how Moore and Russell thought o f it. Both Moore and Russell acknowledged the legitimacy o f constructive metaphysics. We have already seen (ch. 3) that Moore was very much in line w ith traditional philosophy in his belief that the first and most important problem o f philosophy is "to give a general description o f the whole universe." Russell too was in line with the Great Tradition in this regard. On the one hand, his Logical Atomism is a prime example o f traditional constructive metapln sics. Russell described it as "... the view that sou can get down in theorv. if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out o f w hich the worid is built, and that the simples hav e a kind o f reality not belonging to anything else" (Russell 1918a. p. 270). At bottom. Logical Atomism is just one kind o f "general description of the w hole univ erse." The fact that Russell engaged in what amounts to constructive, metaphysical speculation implies that he accepted constructive metaphysics as part o f the philosophical enterprise. Furthermore, unlike Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists. Russell believed firmlv that philosophy, like science, was supposed to yield a body o f true propositions about the world, "'['he scientific philosophy." he once wrote, "aims only at understanding the w orld" (Russell 1914a. p. 109). Its most important feature is its ability "to invent hypotheses [about the world) which, even if they are not wholly true, w ill yet remain fruitful after the necessary corrections have been made" (Russell 1914a. p. I 12). It does this, he went on to explain, by producing a p rio ri propositions which are general in the sense that they are about all things in the world distributive!}', and thus, in a sense, about the world in general. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 182 B. Metaphysical Differences Neither Moore nor Russell ever believed that the only legitimate type o f philosophical analysis was linguistic analysis. In fact it is questionable whether either o f them ever actually engaged in a kind o f analysis that can be properly called linguistic. I have maintained that the nature o f the analysanda makes a great deal o f difference in determining what kind o f analysis one is performing: 's one is doing chemical analysis if and only if the analysanda are chemical compounds: one is doing mathematical analysis if and onlv if the analysanda are mathematical entities. In the same wav. one is doing linguistic analysis if and only if the analysanda are linguistic entities. Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists clearly conceived o f themselves as analyzing linguistic entities. Moore and Russell, on the other hand, pretty clearly did not conceive of their analysanda in this way. In the case o f Moore, he explicitly rejected the idea that his analyses had been analyses o f linguistic entities: I never intended to use the word ['analysis'] in such a way that the analysanduin would be a verbal expression. When I have talked o f analyzing anything, what I have talked o f analyzing has alvvavs been an idea or concept or proposition, and not a verbal expression: that is to say. if I talked o f analyzing a ’proposition.' I was alvvavs using ’ proposition" in s As Peter H ylton has observed the idea o f a proposition, and o f the analysis o f propositions, has often been treated as if they were quite uncontroversial. no more than common sense. This attitude, I think, is quite wrong. Any given conception o f propositions and analysis, is in fact inextricably tangled in metaphysics. The idea o f'fin d in g and analyzing the proposition expressed' bv a given sentence is one that makes sense only w ithin a given philosophical context, which imposes constraints on the process: the philosophical context cannot itself, therefore, be based on a neutral or uncontroversial notion o f analysis. (H ylton 1996, pp. 183 f.) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 183 such a sense that no verbal expression (no sentence, for instance), can be a 'proposition.' in that sense. (Moore 1942b. p. 661) At the heart o f both Moorean and Russellian analysis there is a sort o f entity w hich is otten called a proposition. Carnap spoke of propositions as being constructed o f linguistic symbols, like words (Carnap 1934. p. 56). Likewise, a case can be made that Wittgensteinian propositions (in his later philosophy) are nothing more than verbal or written symbols with a specific use or range o f uses in a form o f life. Moore, on the other hand, took only the expressions o f propositions to be made up o f symbols. Propositions themselves were made up o f concepts; and he took neither propositions nor concepts to be essentially linguistic. That the nature o f a Moorean proposition is non-linguistic was made sufficiently clear in Moore's celebrated essay "The Nature o f Judgment" (Moore 1899). I here, he describes propositions and concepts as being neither linguistic nor psychological, but objective, ideal entities. "A proposition." Moore insists, "is composed not o f words, nor yet ot thoughts, but o f concepts" (Moore 1899. p. 179). Moore goes on to say o f concepts that it is indifferent to their nature whether any body thinks them or not. T hey are incapable o f change; and the relation into which they enter with the knowing subject implies no action or reaction. It is a unique relation which can begin or cease with a change in the subject; but the concept is neither cause nor effect o f such change. ... it is o f such entities as these that a proposition is composed. In it certain concepts stand in specific relations w ith one another. (M oore 1899. p. 179) So. a proposition is thus "nothing other than a complex concept ... a synthesis o f concepts"; and these sy ntheses o f concepts are themselves eternal and immutable, since Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 184 "just as concepts are themselves immutably what they are. so they stand in infinite relations to one another equally immutable" (Moore 1899. p. 180). Moore's doctrine o f concepts/propositions and their relation to linguistic meaning is further developed in Some Main Problems o f Philosophy (Moore 1953). There, he distinguishes between meaning and the expression o f meaning, and he maintains that two distinguishable acts are involved in grasping the meaning o f (i.e.. the proposition expressed b \ ) a linguistic utterance. First, there must be a sensory awareness o f the words, the sounds themselves. But in addition to this there must be a mental grasp o f the meaning proposition which is expressed by the words. This is made obvious h\ the fact that, when someone utters a sentence in a foreign language, we can be aware o f the sounds without grasping the meaning. In order to grasp the meaning, i.e.. the proposition, an additional act is required on the part o f the hearer (cf. Moore 1953. pp. 58 f.. 205). Clearly. Moorean propositions are not in themselves linguistic entities. However. M oore’s interpreters often took them to be such. Moore was aware o f this, and in the Library o f Living Philosophers volume dedicated to his work, he attempted to rebut this misinterpretation. "In my usage." he insisted, "the analysanila must be a concept, or idea, or proposition, and not a verbal expression" (M oore 1942b. pp. 663 f.). According to Moore, the analysis o f a given verbal expression (i.e.. linguistic analysis) would involve dissecting the symbols out o f which it was composed and noting their manner o f combination: consider the verbal expression ’ x is a small y .‘ I should say that you could quite properly be said to be analyzing this expression if you said o f it: "it contains the letter " x \ the word 'is ', the word "a', the word "small', and the letter 'y ': and it begins with "x \ "is" comes next in it. then "a", then "small", and then "y Y (Moore 1942b. p. 661) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Now. this is precisely what the Logical Positivists uere doing in their form o f linguistic analysis. In calling philosophy “ the formal structure theory o f the language o f science." Carnap meant that philosophy was to be concerned w ith questions o f linguistic form. i.e. questions about "the arrangement and kind o f symbols ... out o f which a proposition is constructed, without reference to the meaning o f the s\mbols and propositions" (Carnap 1934. p. 56). By calling it "the logical syntax o f the language o f science." Carnap meant that it should be concerned with questions about the proper application o f the formation and transformation rules for the symbols o f a language. Sim ilarly. Wittgensteinian analysis w as a matter o f determining the proper use o f symbols by observing how they are actually used in various contexts.'1 Moore, on the other hand, claimed that "I. when I talked o f 'giving an analysis." have never meant anything at all like this" (M oore 1942b. p. 661). "in my usage, both analysanduni and analysans must be concepts or propositions, not mere verbal expressions" (ibid. p. 664). In Philosophical Investigations r 244. Wittgenstein proposes that linguistic behavior (e.g.. saving "I am in pain") serves as a surrogate for "prim itive, natural expressions" o f sensation (e.g.. crying), so that in learning to employ the words for sensations, we learn a "new pain-behaviour." According to Wittgenstein, it seems, language is to be understood as a form o f behavior: the production o f sensible phenomena which, in the context o f a form o f life, have meaning. This is illustrated in * 2 and 6. where Wittgenstein sets up the case o f a prim itive language used by "a builder A and an assistant B." A and B use the words "slab." "beam," and so on to communicate with each other. The case is meant to demonstrate that the ostensive teaching o f words, which sets up an association between word and object, is not enough to effect an understanding o f a word (unless, perhaps, the purpose o f the language is merely to 'evoke images'). For understanding, training is necessary: and training is a matter o f fam iliarizing the language-learner with the behaviors associated w ith the utterance o f the word. These behaviors are the use o f the word, and by learning the use one learns its meaning. As Wittgenstein says in r 6: "Don't you understand the call 'Slab!' if you act upon it in such and such a way" (Wittgenstein 1953. p. 4). The im plied answer is "yes." So. for Wittgenstein, all that is involved in meaning are svmbols and their uses. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 186 In the case o f Russell, things are not so straightforward. For one thing. Russell's view s changed in significant ways over the course o f his long career. For another. Russell d id at one point come to accept the view that mathematical and logical truths were lingu istic tautologies, and that, though he originally had not thought so. his logical analvses were indeed merely linguistic analyses. One thing that seems to have remained constant in R ussell's philosophy, however, is the view that the kind o f meaning that is r ! call} im portant is not linguistic meaning.4 " In an 1894 essay. Russell maintained that there was a kind o f meanina had bv ideas: besides their existence and their nature, our ideas have what we mav call meaning. This word is used to denote their objective reference, that is. their reference to something beyond themselves, to something which thev are not. but with which they are intimately concerned. (Russell 1894. p. 196) So. ideas have meaning, and their meaning is their quality o f referring to something other than themselves— what some authors have called their intentionality. and what Russell calls objective reference. According to Russell, it is this kind o f meaning that we are concerned with in philosophy, and especially in logic. In fact. Russell denied that the science o f psychology, limited by its own principles to the study o f the causes and effects o f belief, can be at all concerned w ith "the logical grounds for any belief, since these have reference to its meaning" (ibid. p. 197). Logic, then, has to do with idea-meaning rather than word-meanina. I am unable at present to develop the non-linguistic interpretation o f Russell in as much detail as I would like. In lieu o f a truly complete account o f my own. the best I can offer is a reference to a group o f Russell scholars who have defended this interpretation o f Russell in great detail: cf. Candlish 1996: Greenspan 1996: G riffin 1991. 1996: Flacker Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9905 This essay was written while Russell was still under the influence o f the British Hegelians. However, his views about the philosophical unimportance o f linguistic meaning were not tied to his Hegelianism: for Russell did not abandon the former when he abandoned the latter. Nine years later, having abandoned Hegelianism and the apparent psychologism o f his earlier views. Russell affirmed in the Principles o f Mathematics that "meaning, in the sense in which words have meaning, is irrelevant to logic” (Russell. 1903. p. 47): Words have meaning in the simple sense that they are symbols which stand for something other than themselves. But a proposition... does not itself contain words: it contains the entities indicated1 " 1 by words. Thus meaning, in the sense in which words have meaning, is irrelevant to logic. But such denoting concepts as a man ha\e meaning in another sense: they are. so to speak, symbolic in their own logical nature, because the\ have the property which I call denoting.... (ibid.) The sort o f meaning that is relevant to logic is the sort had by concepts and propositions in virtue o f their having the property o f denoting. Denoting has often been taken to be a relation between linguistic entities and objects or terms. However. Russell insists that it is ” a logical relation between some concepts and some terms, in virtue o f which such concepts inherently and logically denote such terms” (Russell 1403. p. 53).‘: 1497.1498: Hylton 1990. 1996. 1998; Monk 1996a. 1996b. 1997; Noonan 1996: Palmer 1996. " Russell uses "indication" as a technical term to refer to the relation between words and the concepts which serve as their meanings. This is very sim ilar to what Husserl calls intimation— the relation o f sensible sign to meaningful mental act in communicative speech. Terms, in Russell's usage, are not linguistic terms. As he puts it in Principia Mathemutica. a term is "w hatev er may be an object o f thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one" (Russell and Whitehead 1910. p. 43). lie goes Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This view is carried over into Russell's seminal essay "On Denoting." As Ray Monk has noted. at the very center o f his argument in ‘On Denoting" is a rejection o f the notion that language is the subject o f the philosopher's inquiry. The pivotal step in his notorious 'G ray's Elegy' argument, for example, is his discounting o f the notion that the meaning o f definite descriptions might he 'linguistic through the phrase'. His assumption, here, is that, as logicians, we are simply not interested in linguistic meaning, but rather in the purely logical relation that he calls 'denotation'. (Monk 1996. p. 5)1 ' I'll is is the view Russell held throughout the w riting o f Principia Mathcnuitica. Perhaps the most significant change o f view in Russell's career occurred after 191 2 when, under Wittgenstein's influence, he came to accept that the truths o f mathematics and logic were linguistic/symbolic and tautologous (cf. Russell 1950). This change o f view is what stands behind Russell’s later admissions that he was wrong in having originally taking him self to be doing ontological work via logical analysis, fo r example, after on to insist that "every term has being, i.e. is in some sense." and that "w hat a term is. it is. and no change can be conceived in it which would not destroy its identity and make it another term" (ibid.. 1910.p. 44). '' This is significant, for the theory of" descriptions which Russell develops in "On Denoting" is commonly accepted as an example o f linguistic analysis at its finest, resolving philosophical problems through the analysis o f sentences. It is easy to see how someone might take it this way. Russell insisted upon a rigid isomorphism between propositions and their expressions, so that the expressions and their parts could be used as guides in double-checking analyses: the correctness o f our philosophical analysis o f a proposition may be checked by the exercise o f assigning the meaning o f each word in the sentence expressing the proposition. On the whole, grammar seems to bring us much nearer to a correct logic than the current opinions o f philosophers.... (Russell 1903. section 46) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 189 explaining how lie eame to find Ockham's razor useful as an aid to achieving the most precise logical formulations possible. Russell says Ockham's razor, in its original form, was metaphy sical: it was a principal o f parsimony as regards 'entities.' I still thought o f it in this way while Principia \ lathe m at ic a was being written. In Plato, cardinal integers are timeless entities: they are equally so in Frege's Grund^eseize der Arithmetik. The definition o f Cardinals as classes o f classes, and the discovery that elass-symbols could be 'incomplete symbols.' persuaded me that Cardinals as entities are unnecessary . But what had really been demonstrated was something quite independent o f metaphysics, which is best stated in terms o f 'minimum vocabularies' (Russell 1944a. p. 14) Similarly. Russell at one point acknowledged that his original definition o f "types" in the theory o f types was wrong "because I distinguished different types oi' entities. not svinhols (Russell 1944. p. 691). The conversion to this point o f view was. for Russell, a difficult one. In a brief autobiographical piece written for The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. Russell admitted that: my intellectual journeys have been, in some respects, disappointing. When I was young I hoped to find religious satisfaction in philosopln: even after I had abandoned Hegel, the eternal Platonic world gave me something non-human to admire. I thought o f mathematics with reterence. and suffered when Wittgenstein led me to regard it as nothing but tautologies. (Russell 1944a. p. 19) Some years later, in a more prolonged autobiographical work. Russell again mentioned that he had A t the same time, it is quite clear that Russell took him self to be dealing primarily w ith the propositions expressed in language rather than the bits o f language in which propositions were expressed. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 190 come to believe, though very reluctantly, that it [mathematics) consists in tautologies. I tear that, to a mind o f sufficient intellectual power, the whole o f mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal. (Russell. 1959. pp. 211-212) Russell's "linguistic turn" in logic and mathematics, however, did not lead him to adopt a linguistic metaphilosophy. As Ray M onk has observed, "the lesson he took from this [i.e.. his conversion] is not that philosophers should now seek to analyze sentences, but rather that logic did not have, after all. the philosophical significance he had earlier attached to it." (M o nk 1996. p. 56). Indeed. Russell retained the view that philosophy was supposed to be somehow about the world, not merely about language; but he no longer felt that logical analysis was a powerful method for doing ontological work, fo r example, in discussing his realization that his earlier work in logical analysis had in fact only produced insights about m inim um vocabularies. Russell mentions that, insofar as it was possible for the logical task ot constructing minimum vocabularies to make contributions to the traditional philosophical task o f discovering the true nature o f the world, they would be minimal and quite vague: ... there is one kind o f inference which. 1 think, can be drawn from the study o f m inim um v ocabularies. One o f the most important examples, the traditional problem o f universals. It seems fairly certain that no vocabulary can dispense wholly with words that are more or less o f the sort called 'universals.' These words, it is true, need never occur as nouns; they may occur only as adjectives or verbs. Probably we could be content with one such word ’similar.' and we should never need the word "sim ila rity." But the fact that we need the word 'sim ilar' indicates some fact about the world, and not only about language. What fact it indicates about the w orld, I do not know. (Russell 1944a, p. 15) Russell also retained the view that linguistic meaning is philosophically unimportant. Contra the linguistic philosophers, he maintained that linguistic meaning could not stand on its Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 191 own as an ultimate ground for philosophical investigations. Instead, he began to treat language and linguistic meaning as candidates for philosophical investigation and explanation. While word-meaning is taken as a starting point in such investigations, one quickly comes to see that linguistic symbolism by itself means nothing, thus it is not philosophically important or interesting. It is only as symbolism becomes associated, through a process o f habituation, with certain mental states, that it "acquires" meaning. The item o f real philosophical interest, therefore, is psychological. Indeed, in Russell's philosophical investigations o f language from rough In 1918 onwards, he consistently takes linguistic meaning to be grounded in psychological factors. In § 5.1. we saw Dummett's characterization o f the linguistic turn as a way o f grounding the anti-psychologistic stance o f late nineteenth-century logic without resorting to Platonism. Hav ing been divested of his Platonism, however, rather than accept the linguistic thesis. Russell reverted to the psychologism o f his 1894 view. As Ray Monk puts it. "logic had been shown to be essentially symbolic, and therefore fairly trivial: what remained was to theorize— psychologisticallv— about symbolism its e lf’ (Monk 1996. p. 8). Accordingly, in his 1918 lectures on "The Philosophy o f Logical Atom ism ." Russell admitted: I think that the notion o f meaning is always more or less psy chological, and that is not possible to get a pure logical theory o f meaning, nor therefore o f symbolism. I think that it is the very essence o f the explanation o f w hat you mean by a symbol to take account of such things as knowing, o f cognitive relations, and probably also o f association. At any rate I am pretty clear that the theory o f symbolism and the use o f symbolism is not a thing that can be explained in pure logic without taking account o f the various cognitive relations that you may have to things. (Russell 1918a. p. 186) A year later in "On Propositions" Russell gave a more detailed account o f meaning in tenns o f cognitive relations. Specifically, he defended a view according to which linguistic meaning is grounded in mental images. Propositions, at this stage in Russell's career, are treated as the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. contents o f beliefs-, and they can be expressed either in w ords or images, in the form o f w hat he calls word-propositions and image-propositions. "As a general rule." he says, "a word- proposition 'means' an image-proposition” (Russell 1919. p. 308): i.e.. it is a sign for an iinage-proposition. An image-proposition. on the other hand, is a sign for a thing: "some images mean particulars and others mean universals" (ibid. p. 303).1 4 Russell defended this v iew again in a 1921 M ind symposium w ith Schiller and Joachim. There he says: "meaning, in my view, is a characteristic of 'signs.' and 'signs' are sensible (or imaginal) phenomena which cause actions appropriate, not to themselves, but to something else with which they are associated” (Russell 1920. p. 402). The association o f imaginal sign with meant object, according to Russell, is that o f resemblance: the image, in virtue o f its ow n intrinsic properties, resembles the object it means. The association o f sensible sign with meant object is. on the other hand, is mediated by the intrinsic meaning o f the imaginal sign. Sensible signs in language have no intrinsic relation to what they mean. Through a process o f habituation. Russell argues, sensible signs come to be associated with objects and the imaginal episodes which accompany our experiences o f objects. Eventually the sign comes to participate in what Russell calls nmemic causation: i.e.. in virtue o f the psychological faeultv o f memory, sensible signs can come to have some o f the same causal powers had by their meant objects, fo r example, hearing the name o f a favorite pet might cause some o f the same things to happen on the part o f the hearer that the presence o f the pet might cause. Nearly twenty years later. Russell was still committed to the psychological view o f meaning. 1 4 It is to be noted that this view o f Russell's runs precisely parallel to Locke's view that words are signs for ideas, and ideas are signs for things. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In his 1940 book. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. Russell chides the Logical Positivists for their "linguistic bias" and maintains that: it is necessary to distinguish propositions front sentences.... propositions ... are to be defined as psychological occurrences o f certain sorts— complex images, expectations, etc. Such occurrences are 'expressed' b\ sentences... When two sentences have the same meaning, that it is because they express the same proposition. Words are not essential to propositions. (Russell 1940. p. 189) And again, in 1944. Russell affirmed that the definition o f 'meaning' as applied to words and 'significance’ as applied to sentences is a complex problem ... It is a problem that takes one into psychology and even physiology. The more I have thought about it. the less convinced I have become o f the complete independence o f logic. ( Russell 1944a. p. 14) So much for the non-linguistic interpretations o f Moore and Russell. If these interpretations o f their views are correct, then it is the case that there were important differences between their views, on the one hand, and the views o f W ittgenstein and the Logical Positivists (and. o f course, the Ordinarv Language philosophers), on the other. Some o f these differences were metaphysical. For example, both Russell and Moore believ ed, at least early on, that there existed a certain type o f entity very much like what Platonic Ideas have traditionally been taken to be. Furthermore, they believed that the nature o f propositions was such that propositions counted as examples o f this Platonic tvpe o f entity. Other differences have to do with the nature o f philosophical analvsis. and therefore might be called methodological, though they are still grounded in the metaphysical differences. Because Moore and Russell took propositions to be non- linguistic. and because they took philosophical analysis to be the analysis o f propositions. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 194 as opposed to expressions, sentences, and so on. philosophical analysis was not linguistic analysis. Finally, some differences are plainly metaphilosophical: neither Moore nor Russell believed that philosophical analy sis exhausted the range o f legitimate philosophical methods or endeavors. 6.2 How and Why These Differences Were Overlooked In light o f these differences, it seems plainly w rong to attribute the linguistic thesis to Moore and Russell: but this is precisely what the illusion o f Analy tic Philosophv's unity originally depended on. We shall now continue our search for the real philosophical phenomena behind the illusion. Since we're dealing with what can be characterized as a nhsinicrpretution o f the work o f certain philosophers, it seems to me that such real phenomena w ill be o f two kinds. First, there may be certain amenabilities to the misinterpretation in the philosophical views expressed in the imerpreianda. I shall call these passive contributions to the misinterpretation. Second, there may be certain amenabilities to the misinterpretation in the interpreter(s).4' certain willingnesses or readinesses to see in a given figure's work the metaphilosophical thesis upon which the illusion depended— more precisely, a readiness to take the passive contributions in the interpretanda as sufficient grounds for attributing the thesis to this or that figure. I shall call these active contributions to the misinterpretation. As with the passive contributions. I believe that they are best explained in terms o f philosophical views. These views are embedded not in the interpretanda. but in the belief structure(s) o f the interpreted s) I suppose I could use "interpretans” in apposition to "interpretandum." and this would be more consistent in a way: but here we have a perfectly good English word which convey s the same meaning just as economically— the interpreter is the one analy zing. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. themselves. Specifically, they are exemplified in those beliefs which pla> a role in determining interest, which itself plays a role in evaluating what is important and w hat is not. which in turn has effects on what features o f a thing w ill appear most salient to (literally, what features w ill jum p out at) the interpreter, and thus those beliefs which guide interpretation. Ultimately. I w ill try to show that the fundamental source o f the misinterpretation, and thus the misconception, both in the active and the passive contributions, is amenability to scientism. I w ill try to show that the inclination to (mis)interpret Moore and Russell in this wa\ required for the illusion derives from ( I ) active contributions on the part o f the interpreter which can be explained in terms o f beliefs amenable to scientism, and from passive contributions on the part o f the interpretanda. some o f which suggest the linguistic thesis in a comparatively direct way (like Moore's claim to be analyzing meanings), others ol which suggest the linguistic thesis in a comparatively indirect wa\. by suggesting the linguistic \ iew o f meaning. These latter, comparatively indirect, passive contributions can be classified in terms o f w hat I shall call amenabilities to or tendencies toward scientism.l" Before launching into a discussion o f these things. I w ill say briefly what I mean by tendencies toward and amenabilities to scientism. In § 4.2. I attempted to characterize It should be noted that I am using “ amenability to scientism" in two senses. In the context o f discussing the passive contributions. I use it in opposition to "tendency toward scientism." This is supposed to capture the difference between actively tending toward scientism in one's philosophy and passively "leaving room" for scientism in one's philosophy. The latter is a sort o f mere amenability. In context o f discussing scientism as the fundamental source o f the misinterpretation in general, both in the active and the passive contributions. I use "amenability to scientism" in a broader sense. Tending toward scientism is agreeable, and thus amenable, to scientism in a broader sense. It is in this latter, broader sense o f "amenability." which captures both mere amenability to and tendency toward, that amenability to scientism is the source o f the misinterpretation in general. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 196 some ideals o f scientism positively, thus: candidates for objects o f knowledge should be ( I ) sense perceptible. (2) quantifiable, and thus (3) reducible to atoms which would serve as correlates o f mathematical units, and (4) calculationally determinable: an appropriate method should (I) make use o f careful, empirical observation as its primary tool. (2) exhibit mathematical precision and certainty, and thus (3) involve a ealculational technique, and (4) be analytic, discovering the basic realities or atoms which w ill correspond to ealculational units: pieces o f know ledge, or truths, should be (1) observationally verifiable. (2) mathematically expressed. (3) that they should ha\e some practical, preferably/7ra//cmx\ use. and (4) that they should be o f a kind that could be built upon by later thinkers, and thus form part o f a cumulative body o f know ledge. Insofar as a figure or school exhibits tendencies in any o f these directions. I shall say it exhibits a tendency toward scientism. But the ideals o f scientism can be characterized negati\ely as well. Insofar as objects o f knowledge should be sense perceptible, they should not be imperceptible or transcendent: insofar as they should be quantifiable, it should not be impossible to quantify them: insofar as method should be empirical, it should not involve any a p rio ri faculties or rely on any a p rio ri suppositions: and so on. Insofar as a figure or school does not oppose the ideals o f scientistic knowledge, and thus leases a sort o f negative space that scientism might fill in their philosophy. I shall say that that figure or school is amenable to scientism.4 Given my characterization o f scientism and its ideals, there are a number o f general views which are clearly incompatible with scientism. Some such views are Platonism (i.e.. realism about universals). rationalism, and Cartesian dualism. On the other 1 Cf. note 46. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 197 hand, there are certain widely-recognized, general philosophical views which clearlv tend toward or are amenable to scientism. Some such views are empiricism, nominalism, and naturalism, especially in the form o f materialism. I w ill sometimes classify a person or school's philosophy as amenable to scientism if it embodies any o f these general views. 6.3 Indirect Passive Contributions in Moore Whether or not one wants to include Frege as an Analytic philosopher, it is generally accepted that the impetus toward the development o f a new philosophical school did not derive from him. For that impetus, we must look to the British Isles, and to the work o f Moore and Russell. As we saw in our discussion o f the contemporary trend in defining Analytic Philosophy ($ 2.4). the practice o f analysis has been a part o f philosophy almost since its origin. However, the analytic nature o f philosophical reflection was not itself discussed with much frequency prior to the seventeenth century. when method became a hot topic in philosophy. Descartes, for example, consciously emploved a philosophical method involving analysis, one in which he tried to "divide each o f [his| difficulties ... into as many parts as possible" (Descartes 1637. p. II). Hven so. philosophical analysis was not frequently discussed under the specific designation "analysis" or "analytic" prior to the late nineteenth century. In our discussion o f Hodgson's articles on "Philosophy and Science" ($ 4.7). which appeared during that era. we saw him develop a view o f philosophy according to which reflective analysis, self consciously recognized as such, is foremost among philosophy's functions and methods. Even so. it was only in the hands o fG . E. Moore that the idea o f analysis as a philosophical method took flight in the direction that would lead to A nalytic Philosophy. We must Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 198 remember that, in discussing the linguistic turn and the rise o f Analytic Philosophy, we're interested not only in the origins o f certain ideas, but in their popularization: and it is generally accepted that Moore was the first great popularizer o f philosophical analysis construed as linguistic analysis. Given that the notion o f analysis, possibly even o f linguistic analysis, was around prior to Moore, one might wonder what it was about Moore and his use o f anal) sis that enabled him to make it catch on when others, like Hodgson, could not. There are. I believe, four main features o f Moore's use o f analvsis which allowed him to succeed where others had failed: his personal character, his lack o f interest in developing a complete and systematic philosophy, his commitment to common-sense realism, and his commitment to clarity. O f these four, the last three are qualities with respect to which Moore's philosophizing was amenable to scientism. It is a w ell attested fact that much o f M oore's influence had to do with his personal character (cf. W arnock 1966). Moore seems to have had a childlike innocence, which engendered a more or less friendly rapport in nearly all those he came in contact with, including his philosophical adversaries. Though he could be almost annoyingly persistent, so that he might have been called the gadfly o f Cambridge (Wittgenstein, for one. seems eventually to have come to regard Moore's constant striving after clarity as bothersome), he seems to have radiated sincerity and guilelessness. As a result. Moore was able to challenge prevailing opinion on serious philosophical issues, effectively calling them nonsense, without being offensively confrontational and keeping to a minimum the intrusion o f emotion caused by w ounded egos. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 199 Moore was what we m ight call an occasional philosopher. He possessed no innate drive toward a systematic, philosophical understanding o f the world, but was agitated into philosophizing only by the challenge to his ordinary beliefs posed by certain philosophical claims. As he him self admitted. "I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences" (Moore I942a. p. 14). In the Library o f Living Philosophers volume devoted to Moore. V'.J. M cG ill criticizes the rather piecemeal approach to philosophy that Moore had taken. He rightly notes that Moore attempted to develop no grand system o f philosophy, but worked instead in a few specific areas, e.g., ethics, perception, and philosophical method. M cG ill blames Moore’s approach to philosophy on his commitment to a method which was simply not suited to deal w ith other sorts o f philosophical issues. In his reply, however. Moore rejects this idea: it is. o f course true that there are ever so many interesting philosophical problems on which I have never said a word: if by "a philosophy" is to be meant a complete philosophy, there is no such thing as my philosophy. ... Mr. M cG ill suggests that the reason why I have not dealt with some o f these other questions may have been that 1 was wedded to certain particular methods, and that these methods were not suitable for dealing v v ith them. But I think I can assure him that this was not the case. I started discussing certain kinds o f questions, because they happened to be what interested me most: and I only adopted certain particular methods (so far as I had adopted them) because they seemed to me suitable for those kinds o f questions. 1 had no preference for any method: 1 have alway s chosen the problems I did choose only because they happened to interest me most. (Moore 1942b. p. 676) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. zoo Moore had begun his academic career as a classicist, and had gotten into philosophy quite by accident, through meeting Bertrand Russell and being drawn into certain philosophical discussions. In those discussions, claims contrary to M oore's ordinary, non-philosophieal. o r "common sense" view o f the world were made, and it was the desire to respond to such claims that set him to philosophizing. In the autobiographical sketch given at the beginning o f the Schlipp volume. Moore cites an early conversation with McTaggart as a good example o f "what... has always been, with me. the main stimulus to philosophise" (M oore 1942a. pp. 13 f.). Russell had invited both Moore and McTaggart to his room for tea and conversation. During the course o f their meeting, the latter brought up his view that time is unreal, upon w hich Moore's interest was piqued and he began to argue against McTaggart. This gives us a microcosmic picture o f Moore's entire philosophical career, fro m the beginning. Moore's philosophizing primarily took the form o f replies to specific claims made by other philosophers. Whatever positive w ork he did remained closely connected to those claims and the issues they involved. As a result, he did not explicitly develop a complete philosophy, a philosophical Weltanschauung.*1 ' This had a double impaet. On the one hand, it am plified the impression made by his unassuming personal character that Moore was not possessed o f any ulterior motives. Me was not concerned w ith promoting his own philosophy, and in that sense he abstained from taking part in the battle o f ideology against ideology. Rather, he had the appearance o f simply try ing to understand w hat others were say ing from the vantage point o f a neutral 4 N As the quotations from M oore in chapter 3 sufficiently demonstrate, he was not opposed to the development o f philosophical we/tanschauungen: to the contrary , he considered it to be the most important and interesting philosophical task. However, w hat Moore .said about the legitimacy o f that type o f philosophizing had a much smaller impact than what he did in his own philosophizing. And what he did was analy sis rather than construction. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 201 common-ground. In this, he was much like Socrates. On the other hand, the absence o f an explicitly developed metaphysical ground for his own method o f philosophizing left a gap that could be filled in a variety o f ways, but which Moore him self did not fill in. This, o f course, could not but endear him to those full o f the positive spirit. Like the positivists, lie simply accepted as given a set o f facts (the facts o f "common sense") without attempting to give any sort o f ultimate explanation for them. Moore him self was not driven by the scientistic or positive spirit. In fact, he was not driven by prior commitment to anything like a genuine philosophical doctrine at all. The closest one can come to saddling Moore with a general metaphysical v iew is to suggest that such a view is implied by his commitment to what, front a philosophical point o f v iew, might be called common-sense realism. However. Moore did not hold this v iew as an explicitly developed philosophical doctrine but as vvhat he took to be the ordinary, pre-philosophical view ot all people everywhere.4 1 in fact, one o f the reasons he paid so little attention to the explicit development o f a philosophical Weltanschauung, which he otherwise took to be a legitimate philosophical task, was that he was satisfied with the pre- philosophical Weltanschauung o f the common man. Be that as it may. Moore's commitment to common-sense realism is another respect in which his philosophizing (I n O f course, even the pre-philosophical realism to which Moore was committed can and should be treated as a philosophical theory, at least insofar as one can insist upon its being critically worked out as a condition o f its being intellectually respectable. Still, the point here is about M oore's motivation in philosophizing. Whether we choose to treat Moorean realism as a philosophical doctrine or not. the fact o f the matter was that he didn't. It simply was not the case that Moore had constructed some theory which he then went about defending and promoting. He just assumed what any ordinary person in his culture would have assumed, and his un-theoretical manner o f holding it was conv incing enough to enable him to offer what would otherwise be laughable arguments such as "here is one hand, and here is another" in the presence o f other eminent philosophers (cf. Fratantaro I9‘)8. pp. 52tT.). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 202 would say philosophy, but. as we have seen. by his own admission, he had none) was amenable to the scientistic tendencies o f modern thought. On the one hand, he was defending a point o f view that, as I have noted (§ 4.2). was central to the scientistic worldview. The belief in an external world populated by publicly accessible objects, which was an important part o f Moore's common sense view o f the world, turned out to be \e ry important to. among others. Carnap and the program o f the Logical Positiv ists. On the other, it just so happened that the doctrines which at that time most greatly offended common sense were also those that most greatly offended scientism, viz.. the doctrines o f British Idealism. Another feature of Moore's philosophizing w hich could not but have endeared him to the scientistic mind was his commitment to clarity. W hile his analyses did not attain the clarity and precision o f mathematics, they were certainly a step in the right direction, and a great improvement over what later Analytic philosophers would come to call muddled or "w o o ly " philosophizing. So. there were a number o f features o f Moore's philosophizing which were amenable to scientism. He shared with the scientistic spirit an uncritical acceptance o f common-sense realism, which led them to find a common enemy in British Idealism. Both eschewed the construction o f philosophical welumschuuungen in fa \o r o f piecemeal analytic projects, albeit for very different reasons— in Moore's case this was simply the unintentional consequence o f a limited philosophical interest, while for those full o f the scientistic and positive spirit, it was a matter o f principle. And finally. Moore believed that good philosophizing required a higher degree o f clarity and precision than was common at the time. Thus, mainly as a matter o f coincidence rather than principle. Moorean Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. philosophizing bore a certain affinity to the scientistic spirit o f the modern age. G i\en that affinity, it is not surprising that Moore's use o f analysis caught on. As Ryle was later to note, "it is...no freak o f history that the example and reputation o f Moore's analytic method o f philosophizing proved so influential; since here was a philosopher practicing a specific method o f investigation, with obviously high standards o f strictness" (Ryle 1963. p. 5). ft. 4 Indirect Passive Contributions in Russell In 1898. Russell began his move away from Hegelianism. Upon reading Hegel's (rreater Logic, he came to believe that Hegel's views on mathematics were "muddle- headed nonsense." Russell recalls; "I came to disbelieve Bradley's arguments against relations, and to distrust the logical bases of monism. I disliked the subjectivity o f the ' I ransccndental Aesthetic'" (Russell 1944a. pp. I I f.). Around this time. (i. Moore was beginning his rebellion against Hegelianism, and Russell followed. In retreating front Hegelianism, they both ended up embracing what Russell later came to regard as an extreme form o f realism: Bradley argued that everything common sense believes is a mere appearance; we reverted to the opposite extreme, and thought that everything is real that common sense, uninfluenced by philosophy or theology, supposes is real. W ith a sense o f escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware o f them, and also that there is a pluralistic timeless world o f Platonic ideas. The world, which had been thin and logical, suddenly became rich and very solid. Mathematics could be quite true, and not merely a stage in the dialectic, (ibid., p. 12) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 204 This last consequence o f his realism is singularly important, both for understanding Russell and his contributions to Analytic Philosophy. Like G. L. Moore. Russell did not start out in philosophy. He began in mathematics, and later switched to philosophy. The status o f mathematical know ledge was a special concern for Russell: and. while Russell’s philosophical interests were always quite broad, his work in the philosophy o f mathematics and mathematical logic is the aspect o f his philosophical work most relevant to the origination o f Analytic Philosophy. One o f the best-known events o f Russell's early life is his introduction to Huclid at age I I. Ray Monk, in his recent biography o f Russell, writes o f this as having been "one o f the greatest events in Russell’ s early education— indeed, one of the great events in his life " (Monk 1996a, p. 25). Russell seems to have relished almost everything about geometry: "I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the w orld... [It was] as dazzling as first love’’ (quoted in Monk 1996b. p. 25). Monk notes that "[Russell's) fascination lay in being able to demonstrate the truth o f a proposition" ( ibid.. p. 26). As we shall see. this fascination with geometrical demonstration was to exercise a strong influence on Russell's later philosophizing. Russell's love affair with mathematical knowledge was not an altogether happy one. Prom the very beginning. Russell was troubled by the fact that Euclid's axioms, which grounded the whole system o f geometry and provided for the demonstration o f subsequent truths, were not themselves axiom atically grounded: ... though it was delightful and delicious that the truth o f the propositions could be demonstrated from the axioms, the question arose as to what reason we had for believing the axioms themselves. The only reason Prank [Russell’s older brother] could o ffe r was the merely pragmatic one Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 205 that, if Russell did not assume the axioms to be true, they could make no further headway .... (Monk 1996b. p. 26) This answer was not intellectually satisfying to Russell: nor. ultimately, were the sorts of answers which take the axioms to be ultimate and self-evident truths. The fact that Russell was pleased with the results o f deduction but not the grounds o f deduction suggests that he wanted some sort o f deducti\e procedure to \e rify the axioms. Indeed, the reason for Russell's dissatisfaction with axiomatic first principles is expressed nicely in a poem written by his grandmother. Lady Russell, who raised him. Addressing the "science metapln sical.” she sa\s: The cause o f every action You expound with satisfaction. Through the mind in a ll its corners and recesses You say that you have traveled And every thread unraveled And axioms you c a ll your learned guesses. (quoted in Denonn and Egner 1961. p. 28) Apart from a trustworthy method, axiomatic propositions were mereK learned guesses, litis suggests that Russell had a tendency toward what Chisholm was later to call "methodism" (Chisholm 1973)— the position that it is desirable to ground knowledge in a general method rather than in particular truths. Both Russell's desire for know ledge possessed of the certainty and precision of mathematical demonstration and his seeming tendency toward methodism are respects in which his thought exhibited tendencies toward scientism. The d ri\e toward scientism in modern thought involved a drive toward methodism in general just as much as it im olved the drive toward a specific method exhibiting mathematical precision and certainty: for the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. :<)6 successes o f science— which were, after all. what made scientific knowledge desirable— were usually seen to derive largely from its method.'0 Chisholm, in his discussion o f methodism. focuses on Locke and Hume as two o f its major representatives. As we have seen. Locke and Hume are both major figures in the line o f philosophical development which, caught up in the drive toward scientism, led to the context in which the linguistic turn took place. This is a line with which Russell eventually came to identity, at least in part. In the past, much has been made o f Russell's break with the British empirical tradition in respect o f his views on logic. The way Urmson describes it. one would think that Russell rejected the school o f British Empiricism w holesale: The most obvious existing alternative to idealism was the form o f empiricism which had been revived by John Stewart M ill ... M ill's empiricist theory of mathematics repelled Russell. Since Moore and Russell were moving towards a highly realistic pluralism it was clearly impossible for them to go back to M ill. They were in fact reacting against the monism o f the idealists and the subjectivism o f contemporar} empiricism. (Urmson 1956. p. 3) W hile it is true that Russell rejected the psychologism o f M ill’s logic, his overall philosophy bore many affinities to traditional British Empiricism. The most obvious one has to do with Russell's insistence that all knowledge is grounded in acquaintance: "all thinking has to start from acquaintance..." (Russell 1905. p. 104). What human beings are acquainted with, according to Russell, are sense-data. or what he later called percepts (cf. Av er 1971. p. 13). These were atoms o f private experience not unlike Humean perceptions Russell makes this point in "On Scientific Method in Philosophy" (Russell I9|4a). and uses it as a basis for arguing that philosophy ought to seek to emulate the method o f science rather than its results. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 207 or Lockean ideas. So. like Locke and Hume before him. Russell believed that all knowledge was grounded in sense experience. Additionally, Russell's philosophy is similar to the British Empirical tradition insofar as it is analytic and atom istic. Warnock contends that one o f the main things that made Russell's philosophy seem plausible was that: it had a kind o f consistency w ith what had been, before the incursion o f German Idealism, the most constant and perhaps the most fertile enterprise in which British philosophers had been engaged since the time o f Locke. It had long been regarded as at least an important part o f the philosophers task to analyze the gross and complex constituents o f human experience into their simplest elements: ... in adopting the general aim o f arriving at the simple by analysis o f the complex. Russell and his followers were continuing a tradition which had long been fam iliar and seemed unproblematic. (W arnock 1966. p. 25) In 1946, Russell wrote a piece oil The Philosophy of Logical Analysis in which he characterizes his philosophy (w hich, by that time, had been subsumed in the larger Analytic movement that Russell alternatively calls logical analysis and modern analytical empiricism) as a species o f the philosophical genus Empiricus Britannicus. The relevant differentia between his philosophy and that o f earlier British Empiricists was. in Russell’ s view, the use o f formal logic: "M odern analytical Empiricism... differs from that o f Locke. Berkeley and Hume by its incorporation o f mathematics and its dev elopment o f a powerful logical technique" (Russell 1946. p. 305). The powerful logical technique Russell mentions was the one he developed in Principia Mathematical and which involved his celebrated theory o f descriptions and tlteorv o f types. His first inspiration in the direction o f those theories came from what Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 208 Russell describes as the most important event o f his intellectual life, his encounter with the mathematician Peano: The most important year in my intellectual life was the year 1900. and the most important event in this year was my visit to the International Congress o f Philosophy in Paris. Ever since I had begun Euclid at the age o f eleven. I had been troubled about foundations o f mathematics: when, later. I came to read philosophy. I found Kant and the empiricists equally unsatisfactory . I did not like the synthetic a p rio ri. but yet arithmetic did not seem to consist o f empirical generalizations. In Paris in 1900. I was impressed by the fact that, in all discussions. Peano and his pupils had a precision which was not possessed by others. I therefore asked him to give me his works, which he did. As soon as I had mastered his notation. I saw that it extended the region o f mathematical precision backwards toward regions which had been given over to philosophical vagueness. Basing myself on him. I invented a notation for relations. Whitehead, fortunately, agreed as to the importance o f the method, and in a very short time we worked out together such matters as the definitions o f series, cardinals, and ordinals, and the reduction o f arithmetic to logic. (Russell 1944a. pp. 1 2 f.) Russell was initially attracted to the precision o f Peano's method. As he began to use the method, he saw that it could be applied to what had been for him a nearly lifelong problem: the problem o f the foundations o f mathematics. Using what he learned from Peano. Russell was able to ground what had been axiomatic mathematical truths in logic, and thus to provide for the axioms o f mathematics the same kind o f certainty that he originally had enjoy ed in the results o f mathematical calculation. fo r about a year. Russell had success upon success in his de\elopment o f the logistic thesis (the view that mathematics is reducible to logic): but this stopped in 1901. when Russell discovered a set o f self-referential paradoxes. The paradox that arises when [qiimenides the Cretan says "all Cretans are liars" is o f the sort that confronted Russell: if Epimenides is telling the truth, then, since he is a Cretan he must be lying. In the context Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 200 o f mathematics and logic, such paradoxes arose in dealing with propositions and classes. Perhaps the best-know n example is the case of the class of a ll classes not members o f themselves: if it is a member o f itself, then it is not a member of itself: and i f it is not a member o f itself, then it is. Russell struggled w ith paradoxes o f this type for four years, during which time he describes him self as pursuing will-o'-the-wisps, fin a lly , "in the spring o f 1005. a different problem, w hich proved soluble, gave the first glim m er o f hope. The problem was that o f descriptions, and its solution suggested a new technique” (Russell 1044a. p. 13). This new technique was embodied in Russell's theory o f descriptions. The theory originated as a technique for dealing w ith what are sometimes called negative existential statements, statements which seem to refer to things that do not exist: for example, "the present king o f France is bald.” or "the golden mountain does not exist.” In each case, what the sentence is about does not exist. Such statements are logically problematic, for they seem to be neither true nor false. For example, it seems that "the present King o f France is bald” cannot be true, thus it must be false. But if it is false, then "the present King o f France is not bald” or. what means the same, "the present King o f France has hair” must be true. But this is not true, for the same reason that "the present King o f France is bald” is not true. Another o f Russell’s objections to such statements stemmed from his be lie f that in order to ha\e meaning, a statement had to designate some object, what Russell elsewhere called a term: Everyone agrees that "the golden mountain does not exist” is a true proposition. But it has, apparently, a subject, “ the golden mountain.” and if this subject did not designate some object, the proposition would seem Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 210 to be meaningless. Meinong inferred that there is a golden mountain, which is golden and a mountain, but does not exist. He even thought that the existent golden mountain is existent, but does not exist. This did not satisfy me. and the desire to avoid Meinong's unduly populous realm o f being led me to the theory o f descriptions" (Russell 1944a. p. 13). Russell's assumptions about meaning were later called into question, and ha\e provided fodder for the philosophy o f language ever since. Working with that assumption, however. Russell had to explain how a statement that had no meaning could be true, as everyone agreed it was. In his essay "On Denoting." which has become a central text in the Analytic canon. Russell argues that what he calls "denoting phrases"— phrases that involve a noun preceded by a. an. some. any. every, all. or the— have no meaning on their own. but onlv in the context o f a complete sentence which expresses a proposition. What made it possible for the description-in-use to have meaning when the lone description had none, according to Russell, was that statements o f the form "the so-and-so is x " could be paraphrased, or translated, or analyzed, into a different form that was clearly not meaningless. In quantificational logic, ordinary sentences are translated in such a wav that the grammatical subject becomes a predicate and a new. more general subject is introduced.'1 fo r example, the ordinary sentence "all men are m ortal" is translated: "every thing is such that if it is a man then it is mortal." which is usually symbolized, e.g., y.x(S.\— >Px). O f special importance were denoting phrases of the form "the so-and-so." like "the golden mountain" and “ the present King o f France": for such phrases seem to refer to definite, particular things in the world. Russell argued that such phrases have meaning onlv in complete sentences o f the form "the so-and-so is \." Unlike the lone denoting '' Cf. the helpful account o f quantificational logic found in Clarke 1997. p. 38 ff. Some o f the following examples are taken directly from his account. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. phrase, the sentence could be translated into a form that did not seem to refer to a definite, particular thing in the world. In the case o f "the present King o f France is bald." Russell claimed that this meant the same as "there is exactly one thing such that it is King o f France and is bald." The proposition expressed by this sentence is clearly false, and its opposite is clearly true: thus, the logical problem attaching to negative existentials was solved to Russell's satisfaction. On the basis o f their alleged meaninglessness. Russell called denoting phrases "incomplete symbols." Returning to the context o f his problems in mathematical logic. Russell felt that he could treat classes and other problematic concepts in much the same way as he had denoting phrases: What was o f importance in this theory [the theory o f descriptions! was the discovery that, in analyzing a significant sentence, one must not assume that each separate word or phrase has significance on its own account. "The golden mountain" can be part o f a significant sentence, but is not significant in isolation. It soon appeared that class-symbols could be treated like descriptions, that is. as non-significant parts o f significant sentences. This made it possible to see. in a general way. how a solution o f the contradictions might be possible. (Russell 1944a. pp. 13 f.) Russell's solution was the theory o f types. Like the theory o f descriptions, the theory of types involves the idea that certain concepts can have meaning only in certain contexts. In the theory o f descriptions, denoting phrases can have meaning only in the context o f a sentence expressing a complete proposition. In the theory o f types, certain concepts can have meaning only w hen they are used, in the context o f a proposition, to refer to things other than themselves. Russell postulated a hierarchy o f what he called logical types w ithin which concepts and expressions o f a certain type can refer only to items o f a lower ty pe. So. for example, "the class o f all classes not members o f themselves" is an expression Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. o f a certain type, and it cannot be used to refer to itself, but only to things o f lower types. \ iz.. the subordinate entities which make up that class. Both in respect o f his continuity with the empirical tradition and in respect o f his use o f formal logic. Russell's thought exhibits strong tendencies toward scientism. We have already seen how the empirical tradition in general arose as an attempt to satisfy the scientistic drive in modern thought. The major developments in formal logic in the nineteenth century can also be taken as attempts to satisfy the scientistic drive. From the standpoint o f the ordinary language user, the translation from grammatical to logical form is unnecessary and rather peculiar. One peculiarity is the assertion that the aiiahsans and ammlysandum mean the same tiling, so that the former counts as a translation o f the latter. Certainly, for one trained in quantificational logic, it is easy to see the "sameness." but one can also imagine a person objecting to the translation on the grounds that they do not mean exactly the same thing. In the case o f "all men are m ortal" being translated "everything is such that if it is a man then it is mortal." the aiialysuinlum is about all men. but the aiialysan.s is about everything. It may be doubted whether this is a difference that makes a difference, but it may not. I think, be doubted whether it is a difference. The property o f importance as it attaches to differences seems to be largely psychologistic. Whether a difference is important or not depends on one's interests and purposes. It seems to me that, i f what we want is sim ply an accurate understanding o f our world, it is an important difference. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. At one point in his career Russell would have agreed with this.'' Another wav of characterizing this difference is to express it in terms o f mental acts or states o f mind: the mental act o f attributing a conditional predicate to the ambiguous subject everything is a different mental act from that o f attributing m ortality to all men. Put this way. the difference can also be fleshed out in terms o f meaning. As we have seen. Russell believed that our ideas hav e me an in i’ or objective reference, the property o f "reference to something beyond themselves, to something which they are not. but with which they are intimately concerned." 'T h is aspect o f our ideas [i.e.. the meaning]" he contended, "is more interesting to the plain man, indeed altogether more that which presents itself in every-day life, than the psychological aspect [i.e.. the nature o f our ideas and their causal conditions and relations]'" (Russell 1894. p. 196). Indeed. Russell maintains that, in ordinary experience: it is the objective reference [o f a psychosis, which, in this essay, is Russell’ s umbrella term for mental states o f all sorts] which first attracts our attention. I f I see a table, the normal reflection is "There is a table." not "I am in a state o f mind in which a table appears to my sight." Indeed in each o f these I have transcended the immediate datum, in the one case by judging that there is a table, in the other by judging that I have a certain perception (which, be observed, is an entirely different frame o f mind from that in which I have the perception. ...). (ibid.) So. in the ordinary perceptual experience o f the "plain man." he is naturally led bv the objective reference o f his "ideas" to judge that there is something external to his experience which corresponds to it. What is meant by his thought is the external object. Thus, what Russell calls the reflection (a psychosis) "There is a table" might well be expressed in the Moore also maintained a distinction between identity and logical equivalency among concepts (Moore 1942b, p. 667). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 214 utterance "There is a table." Another reflection. “ I am in a state o f mind in which a table appears to my sight.” is closely associated with the reflection ” 1 see a table." " In fact, in certain contexts. “ There is a table" may seem to imply “ I am in a state o f mind in which a table appears to my sight." However tight their relationship mav be. and even if tltev are logically connected. Russell is careful to note that they are two different "frames o f mind." two different psychoses or mental acts. What makes them different is. arguably, a difference o f objective reference: one is about a table, the other is about one's self. Since the objective references are different, and since meaning is fixed by the objective references, the meanings o f the two psychoses are different, as w ill be the meanings o f any linguistic entities which count as their expressions.1 In like manner, to treat a statement involving a denoting phrase and its formal translation as meaning the same, one has to ignore a difference in meaning. In fact, one " The relation between the two reflections is not made entirely clear in this essay. Russell seems to treat the reflection “ There is a table" as an inference from some sort o f primitive perceptual matter, perhaps a bit o f sense-data. As he puts it. it “ transcends the immediate datum." which he later calls the given. I f we treat the reflection as an inference from a distinct bit o f data, the question arises whether the data itself has objective reference, or whether objective reference is a property o f the reflection only. Russell does not answer this question here; but there are reasons for thinking that, whatever the fundamental constituents o f our experiences may be. they must have objective reference. This is because there must be some explanation for what is. as Russell sees it. the fact that the plain man is naturally inclined to reflect "There is a table." Unless we want to explain this inclination psychologistically, which Russell pretty clearly does not want to do. we must seek the cause in the given. Whether the given is a bit o f sense-data or a complete perceptual experience o f a table, there must be something in it that directs us toward the reflection "There is a table" rather than toward the reflection "I am in a state o f mind in w hich a table appears to my sight"; and it is difficult to imagine what this could be besides something like an objective reference to a table. ' l Russell does not spell out the implications o f this view for the meanings o f linguistic entities like utterances, sentences, etc.; but we may suppose that, insofar as linguistic entities count as expressions o f ideas (a.k.a.. thoughts, judgments, observations, etc.), the meaning o f a linguistic entity w ill be determined by the objectiv e reference o f the idea. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 215 has to accept a theory which is sometimes called the thesis o f extensionaiity. The thesis o f extensionaiity proposes that meaningfulness or significance has to do only with the extensions o f linguistic entities, so that, in a given sentence, any word or phrase can be replaced by any other so long as the referent and the truth value remain the same. This is what allows Russell to replace "all men are mortal” w ith "everything is such that if it is a man then it is m ortal.” But why would someone be inclined to accept the thesis o f extensionaiity? Perhaps because one attaches greater importance to Inning a solution to the problems involved in denoting phrases than to keeping the non-identity o f meaning in sight. But now. the problems with denoting phrases arise only for one who is trving to develop a formal logic. For ordinary purposes o f understanding and communicating, the problems that arise for such statements can be cleared up in ordinary language. If .1 savs "The present K ing o f France is bald" and B replies "Really?.” might easiK answer "No. Not really. There is no present King o f France—-I was just making something up." The problem about truth is thus cleared up in this specific case. The problem remains only if we assume that there are general facts about the truth o f statements which apply to them in virtue o f their form, and only if those facts are our concern. One o f the main causes for such a concern is the desire to formulate a mathematically precise, generaliv applicable ealculational technique. By "generally applicable” I mean that it would be applicable beyond the range o f merely mathematical statements. Ideally, the technique would be able to handle all possible statements. Once translated into the concepts o f formal logic, statements not only acquire mathematical precision, but also it is possible to combine them using a ealculational technique to deduce further statements which have the certainty o f mathematical deductions. Indeed, as Carnap put it. in restricting our interest to the formal Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. aspects o f language, "language is treated as a calculus": " I f the rules are set up strictlv formally they furnish mechanical operations with the symbols o f language." (Carnap 1934. p. 57). Thus, the motivations tor creating a system o f formal logic seem to count as tendencies toward scientism. As we have seen. Russell him self was driven by these desires. Indeed, with his “ powerful logical technique" in place. Russell felt that his "modern analytical empiricism" would he able to approximate science more closely than other philosophical alternatives: By concentrating attention upon the investigation o f logical forms, it becomes possible at last for philosophy to deal with its problems piecemeal, and to obtain, as the sciences do. such partial and probably not wholly correct results as subsequent investigation can utilise even while it supplements and improves them. Most philosophies hitherto have been constructed all in one block, in such a way that, if they were not wholly correct, they were w holly incorrect, and could not be used as a basis for further investigations. It is chiefly owing to this fact that philosophy, unlike science, has hitherto been unprogressive. because each original philosopher has had to begin again from the beginning, w ithout being able to accept anything definite from the work o f his predecessors. A scientific philosophy such as I recommend w ill be piecemeal and tentative like other sciences; above all. it w ill be able to invent hypotheses which, even if they are not w holly true, w ill yet remain fruitful after the necessary corrections have been made. (Russell 1914a. pp. 112-113) Although Russell's views changed in many important ways over the course o f his career, one view that did not change much was that philosophy ought to be scientific, in the sense that it ought be piecemeal and progressive, and that the way to be scientific in this sense was to make formal logic the focus o f philosophical activity. Over thirty years later, in speaking o f the philosophy o f logical analysis. Russell said: It is thus able, with regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality o f science rather than o f philosophy . It has the advantage, as compared w ith the philosophies o f the system-builders. o f Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead o f having to invent at one stroke a block theory o f the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those o f science. I have no doubt that, insofar as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought: I have also no doubt that, by these methods, mans ancient problems are completely soluble. (Russell 1946. pp. 305 f.)v This indicates a clear preference for scientific knowledge. Moreover, the fact that Russell had no doubt that philosophical knowledge must be sought by scientific methods indicates a tendency toward, if not an outright acceptance of. scientism. Again. Russell observes: the philosophers who make logical analysis the main business o f philosophy ... confess frankly that the human intellect is unable to find conclusive answers to many questions o f profound importance to mankind, but they refuse to believe that there is some 'higher' way o f knowing. by which we can discover truths hidden from science and the intellect, l or Ihe idea that philosophical knowledge could be cumulative, with each new generation building upon the work o f the former, was very important to Russell. It was an alleged virtue o f modern analytic empiricism that he enjoyed drawing attention to: A scientific philosophy such as I wish to recommend w ill be piecemeal and tentative like other sciences: above all. it w ill be able to invent hypotheses which, even if they are not wholly true, w ill yet remain fruitful after the necessary corrections have been made. This possibility of successive approximation to the truth is. more than anything else, the source o f the triumphs o f science, and to transfer this possibility to philosophy is to ensure a progress in method whose importance it would be almost impossible to exaggerate. (Russell 1953. p. 109) Many matters which, when I was young, baffled me by the vagueness o f all that had been said about them, are now amenable to an exact technique, which makes possible the kind o f progress that is customary in science. Where definite knowledge is unattainable, it is sometimes possible to prove that it is unattainable, and is usually possible to formulate a variety of exact hy potheses, all compatible with the existing evidence. Those philosophers who have adopted the methods derived from logical analysis can argue with each other, not in the old aimless way. but cooperatively, so that both sides can concur as to the outcome. (Russell 1944a. p. 20) I f the course o f philosophy in the 58 years since Russell wrote this can be taken as sufficient ev idence, this proved to be little more than a vain hope. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 IS this renunciation they have been rewarded by the discover, that many questions, formerly obscured by the fog o f metaphysics, can be answered with precision, and by objective methods which introduce nothing o f the philosopher's temperament except the desire to understand. Take such questions as: What is number? What are space and time? What is mind, and what is matter? I do not say that we can here and now give definitive answers to all these ancient questions, but I do say that a method has been discovered by which, as in science, we can make successive approximations to the truth, in which each new stage results from an improvement, not a rejection, o f what has gone before, (ibid. pp. 306 f . ) tty choosing to regard the scope o f human knowledge as limited to what can be gotten at by means o f the sciences and logico-mathematical deduction from scientific facts (this is what I take Russell to mean by "intellect"). Russell and his colleagues were rewarded with precise knowledge o f some things and the possibility o f scientific progression toward knowledge o f others. Apparently Russell believed that this result was worth lim iting the scope o f human knowledge in this way. Given the amenabilities to. tendencies toward, and indeed the apparent acceptance o f scientism in Russell's thought, it was natural for others o f a scientistic mind to see in Russell a comrade in the fight for a scientific philosophy. 6.5 Direct Passive Contributions in Moore and Russell So far. the passive contributions we have surv eyed have been o f the sort I called, in § 6.2. indirect. They do not o f themselves suggest the linguistic thesis. Direct passive contributions, on the other hand, do suggest the linguistic thesis. There are some very obvious respects in which the work o f Moore and Russell contain direct passive contributions to the misconception that they were linguistic philosophers. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 210 III the case ot Moore, the direct passive contributions came from his use o f what might be called "linguistic terminology." Even a brief survey o f Moore's work w ill reveal that lie often used terms such as "meaning." "definition." and "predicate" to describe what lie was dealing w ith or looking for in his philosophical activities, not to mention Moore's frequent appeals to what prim a facie seems to be ordinary linguistic usage. In the same place that lie tried to rebut the linguistic interpretation o f his work. Moore took partial responsibility tor having encouraged it. In speaking o f how best to express analsses. Moore said: It is. in my view, very important to avoid the use o f this word ['m eans'], because by using it. sou at once im ply that the analysandum is a verbal expression, and therefore give a false impression as to what the assertion is that you really w ish to make. I am afraid it is prett\ certain that I have often, in giving analyses, used this word 'means' and thus given a false impression: the fact being that for a long time I did not distinguish clearly between defining a word or other verbal expression, and defining a concept. To define a concept is the same thing as to give an analysis of: but to define a word is neither the same thing as to give an analysis o f that word, nor the same thing as to give an analvsis o f anv concept." ( Moore 1942b. pp. 664 f.) In the case o f Russell, the direct passive contributions came mainly from his use o f symbolic logic, which was central to his whole philosophy. The theory o f descriptions, for example, had the appearance o f being about language and logic, since the technique it supported was a way o f manipulating linguistic symbols in order to clearly display the 'logical form ' o f a proposition. Russell’ s theory o f descriptions was the seminal thesis that stood behind what was once something o f a motto in Analytic Philosophy: "the grammatical form o f a statement may not be its logical form." upon which Wittgenstein grounds his ow n seminal formulation o f the linguistic thesis: "4.003 I A ll philosophy is a 'critique o f language' ... It was Russell who performed the sendee o f showing that the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. apparent logical form [i.e.. the grammatical form] o f a proposition need not be its real one” (Wittgenstein 1921. p. 19). fi.fi The Suture of the Active Contribution In 2.5. I said that, on the view that Analytic Philosophy is an illusion, an important part o f historical work on Analytic Philosophy is to explain how it came to be popularly believed that Nagel's set o f tendencies solidified into a monolithic philosophical school when in fact they did not. w in the now obvious differences among the various figures and "sub-schools" o f Analytic Philosophy were not perceived, or at least were not perceived as being substantial enough to prohibit regarding these figures and groups as members o f the same school: and I said that the attempt to answer such questions might lead us to investigate issues such as ( I ) w hat, in the context o f the main currents o f Anglo- American philosophy in the twentieth century, was taken to be important, methodologically and/or substantively, in determining one’s philosophical orientations and allegiances, and (2) whether there were any general views about the nature o f philosophy or philosophical knowledge, or knowledge in general, or o f the world, etc.. which might explain the widespread employment o f a standard o f appraisal capable not only o f allowing but leading people to disregard or play-down what we are now beginning to see as important differences. I w ill now argue that there were indeed such views involved in what I have called the active contribution to the misinterpretation. Although the direct passive contributions in Moore and Russell priinu facie suggest the linguistic thesis, this appearance should have been quickly dispelled by the kinds o f metaphilosophical and metaphysical differences surveyed in 6.1. But the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. appearance was not dispelled, and an illusion took hold o f the main currents o f thought in tuentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. This could have happened only if those differences were somehow not taken into account. What can account for this failure? It seems to me that the most likely explanation is that a predisposition to scientism, which, as we have seen, was at large in the philosophical population, inclined main interpreters to pass over these differences without noticing them or. insofar as they were noticed, to see them as inconsequential and thus to disregard them. What evidence is there for this view? We can get an initial tlx on the mind-set behind the misinterpretation by comparing it w ith that o f the traditional philosopher. To the traditional philosopher, the metaphysical and metaphilosophical issues upon which our core figures differed immediately stand out as among the most salient aspects o f their respective philosophies. This is because the interest o f the traditional philosopher is directed toward metaphysics. and toward the metaphysical implications o f theories which are not themselves properly metaphysical. It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the possibility o f a principled overlooking or disregarding o f these differences (for I assume that the characteristic Analytic disregard for these differences is not to be attributed to carelessness) would depend upon a different interest, and possibly a different conception o f the task o f the philosopher, one in which metaphysics and metaphysical implications are not thought to be important, and possibly one in which they are thought to be unimportant. The main philosophical views committed to eschewing metaphysics are empiricism and positiv ism. We have already seen that there is a close connection between these two views: both emerged out o f the scientistic drive o f modern thought, and. consequently, they both restrict know ledge to what is available in sense experience and reject Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. as futile the attempt to discover any metemprica! or metaphysical explanation for what is given there. And yet there is a difference between them, and one that is very important for philosophy. Positivism is distinguished from Humean empiricism mainly by what it ignores. We have already seen that positiv ism lias traditionally ignored the grounds for skepticism latent in Humean empiricism. Hume had taken the lack o f necessary connections, causal explanations, and so forth, as grounds for deep worry about the status o f human know ledge. Induction, on Hume's view, was not sufficient to make anything secure: however regularly phenomena might have behaved in the past. Hume could not put out o f his mind the possibility that they might someday behave in an entirely irregular way . Comte, on the other hand, was not concerned about such things. By treating metaphysical philosophv and its issues as the effects o f a natural law of development rather than the products o f rational inquiry , he was able to proffer a principled rejection o f the metaphy sical problems without really addressing them. This is true o f positiv ists generally . It is part o f the modus opcnmdi o f positivism to ignore or refuse to deal with claims or arguments against scientism in the terms in which they are stated (cf. Capaldi 2000). Rather than engage in philosophical argument, the positiv ist prefers to ignore the content o f the argument, and to propose a "scientific" theory for its existence which w ill explain it away w ithout dealing with the issues it raises. One explanation for this is that positivism is committed to what may be called naive scientism (to be understood on analogy with naive realism). Believing science to be the standard o f know ledge, the naive scientist feels secure in a world o f scientific "law." even though there is no apodictically given reason to believe that such laws are absolute. This commitment to naive scientism allows the positivist to ignore much more than Hume's Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. worries. Take, for example. Carnap's rejection o f certain religious beliefs. "Durum mv pre university years." lie recounts. "I had freshly begun to doubt... religious doctrines about the world, man. and God... I recognized that these doctrines, if interpreted literally, were incompatible with results o f modern science, especially with the theory o f e\olution in biologv and determinism in physics" (Carnap l% 3 . p. 7). From the standpoint o f traditional philosophy, such issues as the existence o f God. the nature o f the world, and the nature o f man are to be resolved through philosophical reasoning. This apparentlv did not e\en occur to Carnap— at least it did not occur to him as being the right way to resolve the issues. Indeed. Carnap rejects these religious doctrines on the basis o f their incompatibilitv with science alone. Inning neither brought up the philosophical issues im olved in his own \iew s and the ones he rejects, nor having dealt with the philosophical arguments for or against either set o f issues. In line with his naive scientism, he chose to regard them as matters for scientific, rather than philosophical, investigation. The religious questions, such as Joes G oJ exist/ or Joes man have a sou!/. ha\ ing been answered in the negative bv science. Carnap is unw illing to hear arguments from philosophers and theologians. The kind o f "evidence" they might bring to bear upon the questions is. for him. no evidence at all. for it is not scientific. For the same reason, he is unw illing to answer them in their ow n terms. The questions having been settled by the only kind o f evidence that matters, it would be pointless to continue to debate the issue. A ll that remains is to discover (scientifically. o f course) w in so many people have had such similar false beliefs. And here, anthropology and psychology come to our aid: The belief in one or several gods and in im m ortality was very widespread in all known cultures. This, however, was not a philosophical problem but a historical and psychological one. I gradually found an answer based on Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 224 anthropological results... [and] later ... through the results o f Freud's investigations and in particular his discovery o f the origin o f the conception o f God as a substitute for the Father. (Carnap 1963.. p. 8) So. in positivism, we are confronted with an attitude o f systematic disregard for anvthimi that falls outside the scope o f science. If an entity falls outside its scope, it does not exist, at least not as an object for knowledge. Thus, i f an issue cannot be dealt with in scientific terms, it does not have to be dealt with at all. and certainly not on its own terms. The positivistic method of ignoratio elenchi was firmly entrenched in earlv Analytic philosophizing. Indeed, the strategy o f treating metaphysical statements as meaninglessness, common to W ittgenstein, the Logical Positivists. Ordinary Language philosophers, and. on Pap's view, to Analytic philosophers generally, can be seen as a wav o f ignoring the metaphysician without addressing his concerns. Take, for example. Pap's argument against Cartesian skepticism (Pap 1949. pp. 144 ff.). The Cartesian skeptic, according to Pap. doubts the proposition "there exists and external w orld." However. lie says, this proposition "can be known with certainty by obser\ing the way words are commonly used" (Pap 1949, p. 150). In ordinary discourse, when one says that a thing exists, it is enough that it should appear to be intersubjeetively accessible: when G. F. Moore holds up his hands we see them, and he seems to see them, and we can all talk about them. If. after having met the ordinary standards for existence, the Cartesian skeptic still has doubts about, e.g., the existence o f G. E. M oore and his hands, then he must be using the word "existence" in a non-ordinary sense which either has no meaning or has a meaning that makes it impotent to challenge claims about existence when they are made in ordinary language. Flowever. Pap completely ignores the fact that the phenomena which make up ordinary uses o f words and even words themselves are candidates for Cartesian Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. it is just this external w orld that the Cartesian skeptic doubts. And how are we to understand the act o f observing the way words are commonly used? Are we to take it as a perceiving o f external objects? But this is just what the Cartesian skeptic doubts. For the same reasons he doubts that his eyes are open, his head moves, he extends his hands, and so 0 1 1. he doubts that he uses words, and that other people he "observes" use words. Thus, in standard positiv istic fashion. Pap simply attempts to make an end-run around the Cartesian's worries. But Pap. by his own admission, was not a Logical Positivist. Me conceited o f himself as being a standard Analytic Philosopher, not affiliated with any particular faction within the overarching school. So. the positiv istic practice o f ignonnio clcnchi was not limited to those who were positivists in name. It was part o f what counted, on Pap's \ iew at least, as general Analy tic method. It seems to me that it is ju st this kind o f positivistic disregard that stands behind the disregard o f the metaphysical and metaphilosophical differences among our core figures. Furthermore, "positivism " seems to be the best name for the attitude which stands behind the linguistic turn and the rise o f Analy tic Philosophy . For the linguistic turn to take place, and for Analytic Philosophy to rise, there had to be a widespread acceptance o f ( I) the notion that to our core philosophers, among others, were all doing the same thing, and (2) what they were doing was sufficient to unify them as a philosophical school. The positiv istic attitude, it seems to me. best explains the widespread acceptance o f these two views. First, concerning the notion that our core philosophers were all doing the same thing, consider again Strawson's evaluation o f the unity o f Analytic Philosophy (ef. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction. § 2.6). Strawson was aware that there was considerable divergence o f opinion over just what the analysanda o f philosophical analyses were, and he even noted that difference in the analysanda prim a facie seems to have an effect 011 the kind o f enterprise a person is engaged in: if we make them sentences or statements, then philosophy looks like grammar or linguistics, if we make them thoughts/beliefs, then philosophy looks like psychology, etc.'*’ However, assuming that philosophical analysis had always been linguistic analysis. Strawson says: It does not matter much. now. which we say [i.e.. what we say the objects o f analysis are] Maybe it is best to say. as Moore always said, that the objects o f analysis were propositions. This answer, whatever its shortcomings, emphasizes, w ithout over-emphasizing, the linguistic nature o f the enterprise, the preoccupation with meaning. For. however we describe the objects o f analysis, particular analyses ... always looked much the same. A sentence, representative o f a class o f sentences belonging to the same topic, was supposed to be elucidated by the framing o f another sentence. (Strawson, p. 98) It is an interesting question why linguistic philosophy did not end up as linguistics. Linguistics is a descriptive science, whereas linguistic philosophy was prescriptive. normati\e. In v irtue o f its normative character. Mundle accused it o f practicing what he called "legislative linguistics" (Mundle 1970). The fact that linguistic philosophy did not simply disintegrate into linguistics suggests that there was something more to Analytic Philosophy than the drive toward scientism, for the scientistic drive should have been satisfied with linguistics as an outcome for philosophy. It is not clear to me at present just what attitude it was that was not satisfied with this result, but the tendency among early Analytic philosophers was to try to maintain philosophy's position as a prescriptive discipline (cf. the discussion o f the verification principle, § 5.2B). Perhaps this is a hangover from traditional philosophy— the attitude o f being the ultimate science? Perhaps it reveals that what philosophers really wanted from being scientific was the power to be prescriptive, which science certainly had, not in consequence o f its nature, but o f the cultural response to its results— humanity, it seems, w ill give prescriptive authority to any one, provided they can heal the sick. Perhaps it was simply an anti-metaphy sical stance for which scientism seemed the best positive embodiment, and its attempt to remain prescriptiv e is the result o f its desire to maintain a position o f authority for itself so that it could quash traditional philosophy; thus perhaps an anti-metaphysical view that goes bey ond mere scientism? Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Negatively. Strawson's proposal requires that he overlook or disregard those features o f Moore's and Russell's philosophy which, as we have seen, militate against the linguistic interpretation o f their metaphilosophy and their respective types o f analysis. Significantly, his proposal that one can choose between the designations ''sentence” and '"proposition as if they communicated shades o f more-or-less the same meaning rather than a different meaning altogether contradicts not onlv the remarks Moore made in "Reply to M y C ritics." but also remarks he made in his contribution to the Schlipp volume on Russell: It is quite certain. I think, that an expression which consists o f the words 'the proposition' followed by a given sentence in inverted commas, can be properly used in such a way that it has not the same meaning as the expression which consists o f the words "the sentence' followed bv the same sentence in inverted commas: and I am inclined to think that it can not be properly used in such a wav that it has the same meaning. The proposition 'f ile sun is larger than the moon’ is the same proposition as the proposition I.c soldi cst plus grand cptc la lime, and one would be misusing the word 'proposition,' i f one used it in such a sense that they were the same: but the sentence. 'The sun is larger than the moon" is not the same sentence as the sentence Lc s o ld i cst plus grand quc la lane. ' and one would be misusing the word 'sentence' if one used it in such a sense that they were the same. (Moore 1944. p. 185) So. contra Strawson, it does make a great deal o f difference to Moore what the analysanda are: and. since this is in a discussion o f Russell's theory o f descriptions, it seems that Moore thought it mattered for Russell as well (indeed. Russell acknowledged in his reply that "M r. Moore's paper on my theory o f descriptions raises hardlv any questions as to which I have anything to controvert” (Russell 1944, p. 690)). Though it is possible that Strawson was ignorant of moore's anti-linguistic statements, it hardlv seems likely given the status o f the person who made them and the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. importance o f the volumes in which they appear. He should have been aware o f them: and vet. in his assessment o f Analytic Philosophy's unity, he writes as if Moore had never made them. And so. it seems that he is disregarding them. Even i f he was ignorant o f M oore’ s views, he could not have been ignorant o f the fact that propositions, in the context o f late nineteenth and early twentieth-century German and British philosophy were anything but linguistic. Dallas W illard (W illard 1984) has noted that there is an identifiable pattern among the characterizations o f propositions given by philosophers such as Bolzano. Frege. Russell. Moore. W.E. Johnson. L.S. Stebbing. and others. According to the pattern, propositions have nine main features: ( I ) they are not spatio-temporal: (2) they are not identical with sentences, but may (it is not essential to them that they do so) serve as the meanings or senses o f sentences; (3) they cannot be perceived by the senses, though they are somehow grasped: (4) the same proposition may be grasped by mans people: (5) they are mind-independent; (6) "when the proposition is related to a mind, its relation is. or principalis is. that o f an object o f thought or o f the so-called ’propositional-attitudes"': (7) "description o f a proposition does not essentially involve a reference to any particular mind or act o f thought with which it may be involved on occasion": (8) "its description does essentially involve mention o f its references to. or intendings or meanings of. certain things (which is about), plus description o f how these references are related to one another"; and (9) "the proposition is what is underivatively true or false, while opinions or sentences or statements are true or false only because they have a certain relationship to a proposition" (W illard 1984. pp. 180 f.). So. according to the pattern, propositions are not linguistic entities, but may be related to linguistic entities (words, sentences, etc.) in such a way as to provide them with meaning. And. as W illard indicates, Moore and Russell were among Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ->2<) those who more or less tit the pattern. Against this background, it is exceeding!} peculiar that Strawson could claim not merely that propositions are linguistic, but that that their linguistic nature is so obv ious that to make them the analysanda o f philosophical analysis "emphasizes...the linguistic nature o f the [Analytic) enterprise." Such a view bespeaks utter disregard not only for specific statements made by Moore and Russell, but also for a broad commonality o f view embodied by a number o f m ajor philosophers. Positively. Strawson offers no other point o f unity for the philosophical groups and figures he mentions than the sameness found in the em pirically accessible features o f particular analyses. As he says, "however we describe the objects o f analysis, particular analyses ... always looked much the same" (my italics). On this alone he founds his "general conception o f analysis" as a kind o f paraphrasing, or translating within a language. So. it seems that the characterization o f philosophical analysis as a linguistic procedure depends upon an empirical bias. i.e.. upon deciding, without argument or explanation, that only the em pirically accessible features o f philosophical analysis matter in grasping what philosophical analysis is. It seems clear from Strawson's statements that differences in the objects involved in analysis are to be regarded only to the point that philosophical analysis can be distinguished from the types o f analysis used in other disciplines. Thereafter, differences are to be ignored in favor o f the empirically accessible features o f philosophical analysis. Once this is done, particular analyses do always look much the same— they appear to be linguistic procedures. But. the division between differences that matter and differences that don’t is purely arbitrary. Strawson him self observes that if we make the objects o f analysis sentences or statements, then philosophy looks like grammar or linguistics, while if we make them thoughts or beliefs, then Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 230 philosophy looks like psychology, etc. Thus, he seems to realize that even the differences which he says don't matter prim a facie seem to matter. But then, without so much as attempting to argue away this apparent significance, he makes the above-quoted statement in which he claims that they do not matter. Whatever difference they might make appears to he trumped by the sameness o f the empirically accessible features o f philosophical analysis. In this way. Strawson reveals a bias in favor o f the empirical. And. o f course, the empirical is scientifically accessible. Moreover, insofar as he ignores what a disinterested interpreter would understand to be important— at least important to Moore and Russell— he is following the modus operandi o f positivism, the scientistic philosophy extraordinaire. With that. I 'll consider it sufficiently explained how a scientistic predisposition in the interpreter can account for view (I), the notion that our core philosophers, among others, were ail doing the same thing. Now I w ill show how it accounts for view (2). the notion that what they were doing was sufficient to unify them as a philosophical school. To the traditional philosopher, metaphysical views are among the most relevant when it comes to determining philosophical allegiances and orientations, i.e.. when it comes to categorizing philosophers and grouping them according to ''school." The reason these issues seem so important from the traditional point o f view is that, as we have seen. ( I ) the traditional philosopher accepts that there is a graduated structure in the order o f knowledge according to which the more general governs the more specific, and (2) he takes metaphy sics to be first philosophy . Thus, on the basis o f their metaphy sics, the traditional philosopher would categorize Moore and the early Russell as Piatonists. and this would be the most important feature o f their philosophies for the purpose o f categorizing them according to "school." Russell’ s later rejection o f Platonism and the effects o f that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. rejection on his logic would suggest to the traditional philosopher that Russell had accepted nominalism, though his persistent belief in universals would warn the traditional philosopher that, i f it was nominalism, it was o f a very subtle sort. This would count, from the point o f view o f traditional philosophy, as a change in “ school." O f course, one cannot arbitrarily lim it the use o f the word “ school" to groupings made on the basis o f metaphysical views. It is perfectly legitimate to group philosophers together in respect o f almost any sort o f shared view, metaphysical or otherw ise. I !owe\er. from the traditional perspective, it is not proper to speak o f this or that set o f philosophers as belonging to a school in virtue o f non-metaphysical views unless the assignment is qualified, or unless it occurs in a context where such qualification is understood, fo r example, a certain set o f philosophers might be said to belong to the same school in virtue o f a shared view concerning contingent a priori knowledge. In the context o f contemporary Analytic Philosophy, one might be able to get away with this sort o f classification without qualification: however, from the point o f view o f traditional philosophy, one would have to qualify it by saying that there is a debate o \e r such and such issues, the main alternatives within it are x and y. there is a group o f philosophers who subscribe to x and another group which subscribes to y. thus, in this context, we can speak o f the x-school and the y-school. From the point o f view o f the traditional philosopher, to speak o f a y-school sim plicitcr. or o f a particular philosopher as being a y- ist sim plicitcr. and so on. and to regard these as adequate philosophical categorizations, reflects a narrowness o f interest which is contrary to the traditional aims o f philosophy. Indeed, from the traditional point o f view, one cannot speak o f belonging to a school sim plicitcr unless the relevant commonality has to do w ith a . fundamental \iew o f some Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sort or other, and preferably one o f the metaphysical sort. This is because, on the traditional view. metaphysics is firs t philosophy, it is that with reference to which everything else is to be explained. For this reason, the traditional philosopher would not be tempted to assign Moore and Russell to the same "school" as Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists, except in a highly qualified sense. Now. there are a number o f similarities and even commonalities among our core figures. For example, they all accepted that analysis is a legitimate method in philosophy. Against the immediate historical backdrop o f Absolute Idealism, both in Britain and on the Continent, this shared belief would have been especially salient. Furthermore, these commonalities came to be most directly responsible for. and thus, in a sense, most important to. twentieth-century changes in philosophy-as-a-social-reality. In sociological terms, there was a revolution about to happen in philosophical schools around the turn o f the twentieth century: the old regime o f Absolute Idealism was about to lose its place o f social prominence, both in terms o f losing control o f the institutions o f higher learning in terms o f simply going out o f fashion. There was. o f course, a change in dominant philosophical outlook involved in the social revolution; but the issue o f dominance is. in this context, a sociological issue, not a philosophical one. The philosophical issue has to do with the rational merits o f the respective views or outlooks involved. From the perspective o f traditional philosophy, the contest between Absolute Idealism and the ontological pluralism which supplanted it would seem most salient. However, this is not how the revolution was seen by Analytic Philosophers. Analvtic Philosophers took their views to be revolutionary in the sense that they were innovative; and ontological pluralism is anything but innovative. M ethodologically, the move from construction to analysis was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I not entirely novel either. What was innovative was. on the one hand, the new formal logic, and. on the other, the use to which it was put by Russell and others. One o f the things it was used to do was to lend credibility to a story about traditional philosophy. According to the story. traditional philosophers had been misled in their speculations about the nature o f reality by the syntactic structures of the symbol systems they used in logic and language. As a result, they misunderstood not only the nature o f reality, but also the nature o f the philosophical enterprise itself. Whereas they had thought themselves to be discovering the contours o f the world, they were really only sounding out the contours o f their language. In connection w ith this story, which is purely negative, a positive metaphilosophical theory was developed: viz.. the linguistic thesis. As we have seen. Analytic Philosophers originally took the linguistic thesis to be the main issue in the revolution, and the point o f unity for their school. The linguistic thesis was innovative in just the way the Analytic self-concept required: and. the general metaphilosophical nature o f the thesis makes it an issue o f sufficient generality to support the grouping o f a school around it with very little qualification. Still, from the point o f \ iew of traditional philosophy, it is not the fundamental philosophical activity, the "default position" o f philosophy, as it were. The traditional philosopher requires that some qualifications be made and a context be set before we can group philosophers according to their metaphilosophy. To accept any metaphilosophical thesis as an adequate rallying point fora philosophical school without qualification, one already would have had to reject the traditional view that metaphysics is first philosophy . In point o f historical fact, this rejection came about as part o f the scientistic drive in modern thought. It was only once the scientistic bug had gotten hold o f Locke. Hume, and a host o f others, that metaphy sics Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 234 lost its status as first philosophy.' So. it is reasonable to suspect that anyone who rejects the traditional view is either motivated by scientism, or is buying into v iews that, historically, were motivated by scientism. In point o f historical fact, we find that this is the case with the linguistic thesis. The metaphilosophical crisis at the end o f the nineteenth century did not arise out o f mere philosophical interest. It had been brought about mainly by the modern drive toward scientism. Consequently, metaphilosophical issues were not being explored in an atmosphere free from bias. There were scientistic constraints in place which determined what could count as an adequate metaphilosopln. As we have seen, the linguistic thesis did not violate those scientistic constraints. So, we can say that the motivation to accept the linguistic thesis as not only an adequate metaphilosophy, but also an adequate rallying point for a philosophical school simplicitcr. came from the scientistic drive. 6. ~ Scientism as the M ain Cause o f the Illusion A number o f authors in the Analytic tradition ha\e claimed that those outside of Analytic Philosophy tend to overlook important differences between the various factions w ithin it. and thus to form a false impression o f the unity o f the school. Arthur Pap. for example, noted that "the unanimous practice o f the analytic method as a powerful instrument o f criticism tends to blur these differences [i.e.. the differences between the Descartes is often portrayed as the first to make epistemologv first philosophy. However. Descartes' epistemologv relies on an ontology involving an omnipotent God. mental substance, ideas or concepts which participate in necessary relations with each other, and so on. W ithout this ontology as an explanation for his epistemologv. his epistemologv is bankrupt. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. factions w ithin Analytic Philosophy| for those who look on from the other side o f the fence" (Pap 1949. p. i\). Sim ilarly. Warnock observes that there was in philosophical circles, say 20 years ago. a large measure of uniform ity in practice, overlying, and to a great extent concealing from view, considerable diversity in aims and doctrines. It is not surprising that the situation has often been, and has often been since, misunderstood. It has been particularly tempting. I believe, for commentators outside the professional ring to identify, first, what in fact was common to all parties— pre-occupation w ith analysis o f language: next, to take note o f the no\el idea that this was the sole proper business o f philosophy— an idea sponsored only by Logical Positivism: and finally, confusing this singularity o f doctrine with the general uniformity o f practice, to decide that all philosophers o f the day were Logical Positivists. Phis was in fact not true at any time. (W arnock 1966. p. 40) I low e\or. most Analysts have failed to notice that those within the pale o f Analytic Philosophy have been just as misled about the unity o f the school, fo r both Pap and Warnock. and. arguably, for a large segment o f their Analy tic contemporaries, the unite o f analytic philosophy was grounded in the practice o f linguistic analy sis. However, as we have seen, there was no unanimity o f practice. There was only a unanimity o f empirical appearance. On that basis alone Pap. Warnock. Strawson, etc.. ground the claim that Moorean analy sis and Russellian analy sis were types o f linguistic analy sis, and that they were part o f the same philosophical grouping as Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists. The points o f theory behind the practice o f analysis were ignored by Analysts and non- Analysts alike, resulting in a false impression o f the unity o f the school both within and without. What made this possible was an attitude which allowed people to overlook metaphysical and metaphilosophical differences and to find substantial unity in what we might call the behavioristic aspects o f philosophical analysis. This attitude is best Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 236 characterized, it seems to me. as a predisposition toward scientism. I f I have demonstrated anything at all in this chapter so far. it is that a predisposition to scientism could have been the cause o f the misinterpretation. I have not demonstrated that it urn the cause: and I do not think it possible to do so in any rigorous fashion. However. I think that it is reasonable to regard this as more than merely possible. When one considers the role of scientism in stimulating the late nineteenth-century debate over metaphilosophy and in making the linguistic thesis seem a desirable solution, on the one hand, and the undeniable commitment to scientism in Russell. Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists, on the other, it is impossible to see scientism as bearing anything less than a major explanatory relationship to the development o f Analytic Philosophy. The mere possibility o f scientism having a role in the misinterpretation, when bolstered by the centrality o f scientism to the development o f Analytic Philosophy in other respects, becomes plausibility, even probability. And. the likelihood o f this v iew is increased by the fact that we can locate at least one clear instance o f a misreading guided by scientistic interest. Ayer admits: when I first read the Tractatus as an undergraduate at Oxford in 1931. it made an overwhelming impression on me. In the intervening years I have come to find much o f it obscure and to disagree on many points with what it appears to be say ing, but 1 then took what I wanted front it and did not mind the rest. (Ayer 1982. p. Ill) What Ayer wanted from the Tractatus was just what the Logical Positivists wanted from it: a way o f arguing against metaphysics without entering into metaphysics. The mystical elements in Wittgenstein's philosophy are included in "the rest." to which Ayer paid no mind. O f course, this is only one case: but if a leading philosopher like Ayer could Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. misread the Tnictnius by focusing on its scientistically amenable features and ignoring the rest, it is reasonable to believe that others might have done so as well. It is especially reasonable considering Ayer's influence, on the one hand, and his testimony that Wittgenstein was widely mistaken fo ra Humean (cf. § 5.2). on the other. Furthermore, if Ayer and possibly others were led by their scientistic proclivities to misread Wittgenstein, it is reasonable to think that they might have misread Moore and Russell also. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7. Conclusion I have tried to show that scientism and what we might call the scientistic w orldview played a principal role in the origination and early development o f Analytic Philosophy. The felt need for a new metaphilosophy which led to the crisis in philosophy at the end o f the nineteenth-century; the desire for a philosophy that would be analytic w ithout being constructive; the attitude responsible for seeing the linguistic thesis as not only a possible but a desirable solution to the metaphilosophical crisis, and hence its overwhelm ing appeal and widespread acceptance as an adequate metaphilosophy: the thoroughgoing avoidance o f traditional philosophy and its focus on general and fundamental issues; the misinterpretation o f Moore and Russell as linguistic philosophers, and thus the illusion that Analytic Philosophy was a monolithic school— scientism explains each o f these landmark phenomena in the development o f Analytic Philosophy. and none o f them can be adequately explained without making reference to scientism and the scientistic drive in modern thought. This is a fo rtio ri the case when it comes to explaining the conv ergence o f all these features in Analytic Philosophy. Over against earlier historical works on Analytic Philosophy, this v iew provides the kind o f explanation which they tended to lack. As I explained in the Introduction, works like The Revolution in Philosophy (Ayer el. ah. 1963) and countless other collections o f essays on the main figures o f early Analytic philosophy, gave only expositions o f this or that figure or group. They did not adequately explain how these different figures and groups were unified. By focusing on the drive toward scientism as the principal motive underlying the origination and development o f Analytic Philosophy. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. : 3 ‘ > we can sec how the various figures and factions which are usually counted as the main contributors to the origination and early development o f Analytic Philosophy might he seen as one united confluence, and how they complemented each other in bringing about the supposed "revolution in philosophy.” Over against more recent historical work on Analytic Philosophy. the likes o f which I discussed in chapters I and 2. the view I have presented here is the onlv one o f which I am aware that is capable o f explaining the illusion o f Analytic Philosophy's original unity: viz.. the illusion that early Analytic Philosophers were united in their acceptance o f the linguistic thesis. Because contemporary historians have not been able to discover any theoretical unity unique to all and only canonical Analytic figures, they have been forced to explain the unity o f Analytic Philosophy in terms that place its origination prior to the twentieth century: thus destroying the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy. This is unavoidable. However the points o f unity upon which contemporary authors tend to focus are incapable o f explaining how the illusion came to be and how it came to dominate thought about Analytic Philosophy both w ithin and without Analytic circles. Thus, they must ignore the fact that, for some time, it was widely helie\ed that the unity o f Analy tic Philosophy w as to be found in adherence to the linguistic thesis. Indeed, this \iew was central to the Analytic self-image, insofar as it allowed Analysts to see themselves as part o f a unified school which had overthrown traditional philosophy in a glorious philosophical revolution by its use o f innovative, powerful techniques for solving philosophical problems. On the view I have proposed, we do not have to ignore the historical fact that this view existed. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 240 That we should not ignore this illusory view is paramount, for present questions about the nature and legitimacy o f A nalytic Philosophy have to do w ith Analytic Philosophy as traditionally and popularly conceived, i.e.. with the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy. One o f my main objections to recent work on Analytic Philosophy was that, by acting as if it was merely m odifying the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy when it was really replacing it. it covertly shifted the object o f investigation and thus failed to answer the question What is Analytic Philosophy* in the sense in which that question is norm ally asked, and in the sense that is relevant to the alleged crisis in Analytic Philosophy. Over against the views that contribute to the contemporary trend in defining Analytic Philosophy, the view I have proposed allows us to answer the question in the sense in which it was posed: Analytic Philosopln is an illusion. O f course, the original illusion o f Analytic Philosopln's unity in the linguistic thesis is no longer operative, and is different from the illusion that has been operativ e since the rejection o f the linguistic thesis, viz.. the popular conception that Analytic Philosophy is a school o f philosophy which now exists, and which originated in the earlv twentieth century. The question o f how popular thought moved away from the original unifying illusion to called popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy is an important one. Unfortunately, it is not a question I can attempt to answer here in anv detail. I w ill, however, briefly say what I think is the case. It seems to me that almost the entire content o f the popular conception o f Analytic Philosophy was provided for in the linguistic conception o f Analytic Philosophy. The idea that there came into being a new philosophical school around the turn o f the twentieth century originally depended on the linguistic conception o f Analytic Philosophy; so that, until the Id60s the content o f the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 241 linguistic conception ot Analytic Philosophy could have been stated thus: Analytic philosophy is a school o f philosophy which now exists, and which originated in the earlv twentieth century, and which is unified by its acceptance of the linguistic thesis. The main difference between the linguistic conception and the popular conception is that the former involves a specifically noted ground o f unity while the latter does not. Thus, all that was required to move from the linguistic conception to the popular conception was to abandon the specific ground o f unity, viz.. the linguistic thesis, w hile retaining the rest. In ^ 2.6. I raised the question whether the shift away from linguistic philosophy did not involve, like the conceptual shift in the contemporary trend, too great a change to count as a m odification o f the same concept, whether this was not. as in the contemporary trend, a covert replacement o f one concept with another. Given the above characterization, we can see just what the change consisted in. On the face o f it. it might appear to be a mere modification— all that is required to move from the linguistic conception to the popular conception is to remove one clause from the expression o f the linguistic conception. However, it seems to me that what is expressed in that clause is the foundation for what is expressed in the other two. The fact, if indeed it had been a fact, that there was a group o f philosophers unified in their adherence to the linguistic thesis would have been what created a school o f philosophy in the early twentieth century, the one which persisted until roughly I960. As I said above, it was the linguistic thesis that originally enabled Analysts to see themselves as part o f a unified school which had overthrown traditional philosophy in a glorious philosophical revolution by its use o f innovative, powerful techniques for solving philosophical problems. Without the illusion o f unitv in the linguistic thesis, there could not have been the belief in a school which originated in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 242 early twentieth century and which had persisted until roughly I960. Thus, to remove the linguistic clause is to remove the justification for affirm ing the other two clauses. To continue to affirm them in a philosophically responsible manner, there must be another ground o f unity for the school: but a different ground o f units would seem to make it a different school, hence a different object, hence a different concept. In any case, although some ground o f unity is required to justify affirmation o f the two clauses o f the popular concept, no alternative to the linguistic thesis has arisen. Unity has been assumed without specifying a ground. This itself is a curious phenomenon, requiring explanation— yet another important issue which I cannot adequate!) address at present. However. I w ill again indicate briefly what I think is the case, first. bv the time the linguistic thesis was abandoned. Analytic Philosophy had become something o f a sociological unit: and, presumably, the sociological unity has played a part in preserving the illusion o f philosophical unity. Second, it is pri/tui facie plausible that the same positivistic disregard for foundational matters that explains the misinterpretation o f Russell and Moore might help to explain the continued illusion o f unity in the absence o f e\en the appearance o f a foundation for that unity. After all. the same scientistic attitude which enabled the positive spirit to have influence even outside the boundaries o f Positivism proper has remained central in post-linguistic Analytic Philosophy . Though I cannot here present a detailed case for this view , the plausibility o f it can easily be seen by considering three facts. first, the continuing influence o f scientism explains contemporary Analytic Philosophy 's continued opposition to traditional philosophy. I have noted that the origins o f Analytic Philosophy are connected to the linguistic turn, and that the linguistic turn was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. counted as revolution in philosophy. Revolution, in the sense we are concerned w ith here, involves the overthrow o f some established regime by some entity opposed to it. and the institution o f a new regime by that entity. In the case o f the linguistic turn, the old regime was "traditional" or "speculative" philosophy, and the new regime is none other than Analytic Philosophy. But w ith the disintegration o f Analytic Philosophy we are confronted w ith a peculiar situation: the new regime, after having overthrown traditional philosophy and secured for itself a position o f dominance in Anglo-American philosophy, renounced the very doctrines which had constituted the explicit core o f its revolutionary platform . In other words. Analytic Philosophy came to regard as mistaken many o f the beliefs that motivated the revolution which gave it birth and enabled it to supplant traditional philosophy. And although Analytic Philosophy rejected, in this sense, the new regime, it did not return to the ways o f the old regime. Contemporary Analytic Philosophy still considers itself to be. and in fact is. something quite different from, and in manv respects opposed to. traditional philosophy.'* However, insofar as contemporary A nalytic Philosophy has come to reject the grounds of the original revolution, it is unclear just what the grounds o f the present difference and opposition to traditional philosophy are. and whether they provide sufficient reason for continuing to reject traditional philosophy . It seems to me that the continued opposition to traditional philosophy is best explained in terms o f the continuing influence o f the original scientistic commitment o f early Analytic Philosophy. s One way in which this opposition manifests itself is in the ahistorical or anti-historical attitude which is frequently noted as being characteristic o f Analytic Philosophy . Though this attitude seems slowly to be passing away, there are still many Analysts who seem to operate on the assumption that nothing worthwhile happened in philosophy prior to the twentieth century. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 244 Second, though Analytic Philosophy is no longer a philosophical school in the genuine sense— i.e.. a group o f philosophers exhibiting a voluntary cohesion in virtue of their explicit acceptance of some common set o f doctrines, practices, or interests— and though there is apparently no set o f necessary and sufficient conditions for being an Analytic philosopher, still there are certain characteristic tendencies in Analytic Philosophy. Discussions o f Rorty's "set o f problems" tend to take place within certain constraints, methodological, stylistic, and substantive: e.g.. it is rare to see Platonic forms or Cartesian minds proposed as contributing to the solution o f a problem in Analytic Philosophy Proposed solutions to these problems exhibit certain prevailing tendencies or preferences: e.g.. to explain linguistic reference in terms o f causation, to treat thought as linguistic, etc. Since the 1960s. the main questions that have been taken to be important in Analvtic circles, and the kinds o f answers that have been thought acceptable, have been, bv and large, scientistieallv amenable. In the philosophv o f mind, for example, discussion has been dominated by behaviorisms o f various sorts, physicalism. the identity thesis, eliminative materialism and functionalism. Under the reign o f functionalism, propertv dualism has recently gained in popularity: but few are w illing to take seriously the possibility o f substance dualism. Indeed, the dominant views in metaphysics and epistemology from the 60s on have been, on the whole, amenable to materialism, empiricism, and the whole pantheon o f scientistieallv amenable views: at least in the negative sense that they have been uncongenial to traditional views about universals. minds, and substances. It seems to me that these tendencies are best explained in terms o f the continuing influence o f the original scientistic commitment o f early Analvtic Philosophv. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 245 Third, post-linguistic Analytic Philosophy has continued to express the scientistic uorld\ iew ''m ethodologically." through the practice o f Analytic philosophizing. Since the '60s. Analytic philosophizing has been conducted in piecemeal fashion. There has been little interest in developing the kinds o f general views which could serve both to izround and to unify all other Analytic philosophizing. As I mentioned in ^ 1.1, although the slogan “ don't ask what philosophy is— do some" is no longer explicith promulgated in Analytic circles, its influence is still present in Analytic practice insofar as mam contemporary Analytic philosophers seem to feel that they can continue working on their specialized problems w ithout first working out adequate solutions to the crisis-issues. The present state o f Analy tic Philosophy as “ the particular set o f problems beimt discussed bv philosophy professors in certain parts o f the w orld." with no real sense o f the units o f those problems, must be seen against the backdrop o f the original Analy tic rejection o f the traditional, foundationalist approach to philosophy, which was itself a result o f the scientistic drive, and against the backdrop o f the scientistic ideal o f being able to treat philosophical problems separately from one another w ithout constructing a general view o f the world which would unify them. So. there seems to be prinui facie support for there being a certain eontinuitv o f scientistic influence in post-linguistic Analytic Philosophy. Though I cannot develop the case for this view any further at present, as I noted in the Introduction, the dominance o f scientism and scientistieallv amenable views like materialism in post-linguistic Analytic Philosophy has been discussed by other contemporary authors like Putnam and Clarke (cf. Putnam 1992. Clarke 1997). It is worth mentioning that, over against the their v iews, which treat the dominance o f scientism as a relatively recent development within Analytic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 246 Philosophy, the view I have developed here demonstrates that scientism had a pervasive influence on the core areas o f Analv tic Philosophv from the very beginning. Takinu mv v iew together with theirs, we can see a continuity o f scientistic influence in Analvtic Philosophv from the very beginning up through the present. Another advantage o f the view I have proposed is that it is capable o f prov iding some enlightenment and some guidance with regard to the crisis in Analvtic Philosophv. In terms o f enlightenment, the view that I have proposed suggests a plausible explanation for the emergence o f the crisis in Analv tic Philosophv . I characterized the crisis as Heins’ metaphilosophical in nature, stemming from the repeated failure o f Analvtic Philosophv to adequately define itself in terms o f its subject-matter and its methods. On the v iew I have proposed. Analv tic Philosophy can be seen as part o f what has been, for at least 300 years now. an ongoing cycle in philosophy: the one created by scientistieallv minded philosophers trying, failing, and trying again, to come up with an adequate scientistic philosophy. The linguistic thesis, which more than anything else was responsible for the origination o f Analvtic Philosophv . came into being as a solution to the crisis in philosophv at the end o f the nineteenth-century; a crisis which had to do with the standing o f philosophy as a field o f knowledge relative to science. However. Analy tic philosophers were never able to work out the details o f the linguistic thesis adequately. We have seen Nagel's assessment 2.4) that, in 1936. the leaders o f the Analy tic mov ement maintained suspended judgments on central issues. Nine years later, speaking o f the broader "realist" mov ement o f which Analytic Philosophy was a part (cf. § 4.1). Russell echoes Nagel: The new philosophy which was thus inaugurated [i.e.. in the revolt against German idealism] has not yet reached a final form, and is still in some respects immature. Moreover, there is a very considerable measure o f Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 247 disagreement among its various advocates. It is in parts somewhat abstruse. For these reasons, it is impossible to do more than set forth some o f its salient features. (Russell 1945. p. 268) So. Analytic Philosophy remained unfinished, even during the years o f its ascent. But this did not prevent Analytic philosophers from making bold claims about the nature o f philosophy, the unparalleled significance o f Analytic Philosophy, and the wrong headedness o f traditional philosophy. Ayer has observed that "the employment o f the [verification] principle did not wait upon its proper formulation" (A yer 1959. p. 14). The same could be said o f the linguistic thesis: the use o f the linguistic thesis as a general metaphilosophical theory capable o f grounding a new philosophical school did not wait upon its proper formulation. By the 1960s. the drive to find the proper formulation o f linguistic thesis had pretty much died out: but no metaphilosophical thesis arose to take its place as the apparent unifying feature o f Analytic Philosophy. Indeed, metaphilosophical interest waned for many years. Since that time. Analytic Philosophy has been, to borrow again Rorty's phrase, "the particular set o f problems being discussed by philosophy professors in certain parts o f the w orld." But there has been no underlying unity to the set o f problems, no principled reason why one problem or set o f problems should be focused on to the exclusion ot others. In other words, there has been no guiding and unifying metaphilosophy. To make a rather hackneyed analogs, but one which effectively communicates the problem. Analytic Philosophv is and has always been like a house built without a foundation. As I said in $ 1.4, a great part o f the history o f Analytic Philosophy is the story o f the successive rejection, by later generations o f Analysts, o f earlier generations' views Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 248 concerning the methods and subject matter o f philosophy. Until the 1960s. the process o f rejection and reformulation took place under the unifying standard o f the linguistic thesis. As long as the linguistic thesis remained in place. Analytic Philosophy was able to rest secure in a self-image grounded in its apparent linguistic character. It was felt that the need for metaphilosophical selt-definition had been met in a general way by saying that philosophy had to do w ith the analysis o f language: all that remained was to work out the details. However, no specific formulation o f the subject matter or methods o f Analytic Philosophy survived for much more than two decades. As a result. Analytic Philosophy was open to the charge, mentioned by Johnstone in 1956. that "analysis has never gained an inch o f ground that it could permanently call its ow n" (Johnstone 1956. p. 139). Since the 1960s. no real progress has been made in this area. As a result, it can be said that Analy tic Philosophy has never been the name o f a proven philosophical program, and it is still legitimate to wonder whether Analytic Philosophy has yet made any solid progress bey ond the crisis at the end o f the nineteenth-century. l or reasons that are not entirely clear, the drive toward the form ulation o f an adequate Analytic metaphilosophy simply gave out in the 1960s. For reasons equally unclear, it has recently begun to emerge again. Doubtless, this is partially explained by the tact, revealed by Burge's fictional dialogue (Burge 1999. ef. § 1.2). that contemporary Analytic Philosophy has ceased, by and large, to serve ordinary human interests. This daw ning realization seems to be one of the main reasons people are now demanding that Analytic Philosophy justify its existence by saying clearly what it is. what it does, and how it makes a contribution to human life. The view I have developed here is relevant in a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. : 4 i) number o f nays to the discussion that is beginning to be generated by this growing desire tor an adequate metaphilosophy. First, as we saw in {j 1.1. some have responded to the present crisis-state o f Analytic Philosophy by calling for a reformation o f Analytic Philosophv. The call for relormation is correct insofar as it stems from the recognition that not all is well in Analvtic Philosophy— certainly, energies and interests need to be re-directed. However, the call for reformation testifies to the persistence o f the popular idea that, whatever its unitv may consist in. Analvtic Philosophv is a philosophical school, or at least some sort o f unilied philosophical detachment. But now. i f it is reasonable to question whether it makes sense to talk about Analytic Philosophy as anything more than an illusion, it is also reasonable to question whether Analvtic Philosophv is the sort o f thing that can be reformed. If it is not, then any attempt to reform it w ill be a dead-end effort, and any belief that it has been successfully reformed w ill be as false as belief in the school itself. Second, the constraining influence o f scientism on Analv tic thought has not lacked a place in reflection on the crisis. Take, for example, the way Tyler Burge deals with the crisis in Analvtic Philosophy. According to Burge, philosophy in the twentieth century tended to deflate both the specialness o f the human being and o f philosophy itself. This deflationary tendency was amplified by what Burge variously describes as "a negative mood" and "a self-destructive streak" in Analytic Philosophy, which he supposes was brought oil by a number o f social phenomena. Among these "social causes." he includes the rise o f the natural sciences, especially neuroscience and psychoanalysis, and "the advent o f methods o f mass destruction and a series o f regimes bent on genocide" (Burge 1999, p. 29). Corporately, these phenomena were sufficient to castigate what he sees as the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. overly optimistic philosophy o f previous centuries— philosophy as done by. e.g.. Liebniz. Fichte, and Bradley. Burge regards the curtailing o f what he regards as metaphysical excesses as one o f a number o f lasting achievements o f twentieth-century Analvtic Philosophy: and he explicitly grounds this achievement in what he regards as yet another achievement o f twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy: the integration o f philosophv with science. ■'Scientific knowledge and modeling." Burge says, "have checked metaphysical excess better than in previous centuries" (Burge 1999. p. 30). So. on Burge's view, the problem with Analvtic Philosophv is not merely that it has been deflationary; for some deflation is good. It turns out. on Burge's view, that the problem w ith twentieth-century Analvtic Philosophy is that its deflations have been too sim plistic. "Positivism. Wittgensteineanism. Ordinary Language Philosophy. Naturalism (as in Naturalized Lpistemology). and many other isms." he says. "have tried to show that philosophical problems are the result o f some simple oversight. (Burge 1999. p. 25. my italics): and "what is distinctive [o f the twentieth century| is the array o f sim plistic deflations o f philosophv and humankind" (ibid.. p. 29. my italics). Although Burge does not explicitly say in general terms w hat a solution to this problem would iook like, presumably he would like to see attempts at more sophisticated deflationary theories. What philosophv must now do. according to Burge is to "help us understand our specialness w ithout falling into the idealisms and hyperintellectualizations that distorted early modern philosophy" (Burge 1999. p. 30). Burge wants a solution to the crisis which w ill not go beyond the boundaries o f scientistic amenability. However, if Analv tic Philosophy is really just the latest installment in a 300 year tradition o f failed attempts at a scientistic philosophy, one might lake this as Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. good circumstantial evidence that the project is self-defeating. Indeed, philosophers from I 'l l . Green to Husserl to George Bealer have argued that empiricism, which is an essential part of any scientistic philosophy, is incoherent. A t the very least, seeing Analytic Philosophy in this way lends some credibility to the notion that perhaps it is time to stop worrying about scientistic amenability, and to try to formulate an adequate metaphilosophy w ithout scientistic strictures. fhe foregoing are possible views which could be developed on the basis the view I have developed here. I mention them to illustrate how. over against other views o f Analytic Philosophy, in addition to being more illum inating with regard to the history and nature o f Analytic Philosophv, mine might also be more practically useful in terms o f guiding thought about Analvtic Philosophv and its present crisis, understanding how it came to this state o f crisis, and especially in suggesting ways out o f it. The development o f these prospects, however, must be left for future work. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 5 2 Bibliography Ayer. A. J. 1952: Language Truth and Logic. New York: Dover Publications. Inc. ________ . 1959: "E ditor's Introduction." in A.J. Ayer. ed.. Logical Positivism. Westport: Greenwood Press. 1959. • 1968: "Can There Be a Private Language?." Aristotelian Society Proceedings. Supplementary Volume 28. 63-76: reprinted in The Philosophy o f Wittgenstein, ed. J.V. Canfield, vol. 9. 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London: John Murray. ________ . 1997a: "T he Concept o f Scientific History." in The Proper Study o f Mankind. Hardy and Hausheer eds.. New York: Farrar. Straus, and Giroux, pp. I 7-58. ________ . 1997b: "The Divorce Between the Sciences and the Humanities." in The Proper Study o f Mankind. Flardy and Hausheer eds.. New York: Farrar. Straus, and Giroux, pp. 326-358. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 5 3 Biletzki and Matar. 1998: "Preface." in Biletzki and Matar. eds. 1998. pp. \i-x iv . Biletzki and Matar. eds. 1998: The Story o f Analytic Philosophy: Plot am i Heroes. London and New York: Routledge. Bouusma. O. K. 1965: Philosophical Essays. Lincoln: University o f Nebraska Press. Burtt. E.A. 1932: The Metaphysical Foundations o f Modern Physical Science: A H istorical and C ritical Essay. London: Routledge and Regan Paul Ltd. Candlish. 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