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3 MODERN SCHOOLS |
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The methods that have dominated British
philosophy for most of the 20th century and American philosophy since somewhat
more recently have been called Linguistic and Analytic because language
and the analysis of the concepts expressed by
language have been a central concern. Though Australia and the Scandinavian
countries have also contributed to this movement, it has won a very limited
following elsewhere. Although there is a unity of outlook in the tradition,
individual philosophers and movements within it have differed, often radically,
about the goals and methodology of philosophy. A leading figure prior to the
mid-20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, an
Austrian-born Cambridge philosopher, for example, may have been unique in the
history of philosophy in having engaged in two periods of profoundly influential
philosophical productivity of which the later work was in large part a
renunciation and a sustained argument against the earlier. Yet both the early
Wittgenstein (represented by his Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, 1922) and the later (represented by the Philosophical
Investigations, 1953) are central examples of Analytic
philosophy. |
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Moreover, the aims assigned to the
philosophical study of language have often been different. Some philosophers,
among them Bertrand Russell and the early
Wittgenstein, have thought that the underlying structure of language mirrors
that of the world--that from an analysis of language a philosopher can grasp
important truths about reality. This so-called picture
theory of language, though influential, is generally repudiated by
current Analytic philosophers. Another important dispute concerns whether
everyday language is defective, vague, misleading, and even, at times,
contradictory. Some Analytic philosophers have thus proposed the construction of
an "ideal" language: precise, free of
ambiguity, and clear in structure. The general model for such a language has
been symbolic logic, the growth of which in the
20th century has played a central role in Analytic philosophy. An ideal
language, it was thought, would resolve many traditional philosophical disputes
that have arisen from the misleading structure of natural languages. At the
other pole, some philosophers have thought that many philosophic problems have
come from paying too little attention to what men say in everyday language about
various situations. |
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Despite such disagreements, Analytic
philosophers have much in common. Most of them, for example, have concentrated
on particular philosophical problems, such as that of induction, or have
examined specific concepts, such as those of
memory or of personal identity, without attempting to construct any grand
metaphysical schemes--an attitude that has roots as ancient as those of the
Socratic method exemplified in Plato's
dialogues. Almost invariably Plato began with specific questions such as
"What is knowledge?" or "What is justice?" and pursued them
in a way that can be viewed, without undue strain, as philosophical analysis in
the modern sense. |
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Ideally, a philosophical analysis
illuminates some important concept and helps to answer philosophical questions
involving the concept. A famous example of such analysis is contained in Bertrand
Russell's theory of definite descriptions.
In a simple subject-predicate statement such as "Socrates is wise," he
said, there seems to be something referred to (Socrates) and something said
about it (that he is wise). If, instead of a proper name,
however, a "definite description" is
substituted, as in the statement "The president of the United States is
wise," there is apparently still something referred to and something said
about it. But a problem arises when nothing fits the description, as in the
statement "The present king of France is wise." Though there is
apparently nothing for the statement to be about, one nevertheless understands
what it says. Consequently, a pre-World War I philosopher, Alexius
Meinong, celebrated for his Gegenstandstheorie
("theory of objects"), felt forced by such examples to distinguish
between things that have real existence and things that have some other sort of
existence; for such statements could not be understood unless they were about
something. |
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In Russell's view, philosophers such as
Meinong were misled by surface grammatical form into thinking that such
statements are simple subject-predicate statements. In reality they are complex;
in fact, an analysis of the foregoing example shows that the definite
description, "the present king of France," is not an independent unit
in the statement at all. Upon analysis, the statement is a complex conjunction
of statements: (1) "There is a present king of France"; (2)
"There is at most one present king of France"; and (3) "If anyone
is a present king of France, he is wise." But, more importantly, each of
the three components is a general statement and is not about anything or anyone
in particular. There is no phrase in the complete analysis equivalent to
"the present king of France," which shows that the phrase is not an
expression, like a proper name, that refers to something as the thing that the
whole statement talks about. There is no need, therefore, to make Meinong's
distinction between things that have real existence and things that have some
other kind of existence. |
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Analytic philosophy is concerned with
the close and careful examination of concepts. |
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In spirit and style Analytic philosophy
has strong ties with the Empiricist tradition,
which stresses the data received through the senses and which, except for brief
periods, has characterized British philosophy for some centuries, distinguishing
it from the more Rationalistic trends of continental European philosophy. It is
not surprising, therefore, that Analytic philosophy should find its home mainly
in the Anglo-Saxon countries. In fact, the beginning of modern Analytic
philosophy is generally dated from the time when two of its major figures,
Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, both Cambridge
philosophers, rebelled against an anti-Empiricist Idealism that had temporarily
captured the English philosophical scene. The most famous British
Empiricists--John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill--had
many interests, doctrines, and methods in common with contemporary Analytic
philosophers. Although many of their particular doctrines are favorite targets
of attack by Analytic philosophers today, one feels that this is more the result
of a common interest in certain problems than any difference in general
philosophical outlook. |
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Most Empiricists, though admitting that
the senses fail to yield the certainty requisite for knowledge, hold nonetheless
that it is only through observation and experimentation that justified beliefs
about the world can be gained; i.e., a
priori reasoning from self-evident premises cannot reveal how the world is. This
view has resulted in a sharp dichotomy among the sciences: between the physical
sciences, which ultimately must verify their theories by observation, and the
deductive or a priori sciences--e.g., mathematics
and logic--the method of which is the deduction of theorems from given axioms.
Thus, the deductive sciences cannot give justified beliefs, much less knowledge,
of the world. This consequence was one of the cornerstones of two important
movements within Analytic philosophy, logical atomism and Logical Positivism
(see below Logical
Positivism and Logical Empiricism ).
In the Positivist's view, for example, the theorems of mathematics are merely
the result of working out the consequences of the conventions that have been
adopted for the use of its symbols. (see also a
priori knowledge, science, philosophy of) |
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The question then arises whether
philosophy itself is to be assimilated to empirical or to a priori sciences.
Early Empiricists assimilated philosophy to the Empirical sciences. They were
less self-reflective about its methods than contemporary Analytic philosophers
are. Being preoccupied with epistemology (theory of knowledge) and the
philosophy of mind, and holding that fundamental facts can be learned about
these subjects from individual introspection, they took their work to be a kind
of introspective psychology. Analytic philosophers in the 20th century, on the
other hand, have been less inclined to appeal ultimately to direct
introspection. Moreover, the development of rigorous methods in formal logic
seemed to promise help in solving philosophical problems--and logic is as a
priori as a science can be. It seemed, then, that philosophy must be classed
with mathematics and logic. |
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The question remained, however, what
philosophy's function and methodology are. For a great many Analytic
philosophers who do philosophy in the minute and meticulous manner of G.E. Moore
and, in particular, for those who have made Oxford the centre of Analytic
philosophy (see below, Recent
trends in England: Oxford philosophers ),
its business is the analysis of concepts. For them, philosophy is an a priori
discipline because the philosopher in some sense already possesses the concept
in which he is interested and needs no observations in order to analyze it. |
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Philosophy can be seen either as
conceptual or as linguistic analysis. In the analysis of the concept of seeing,
for example, the philosopher is not expressing purely linguistic concerns--with,
say, the English verb "to see"--though an investigation of what can be
said using that verb may be relevant to his conclusions. For a concept is
independent of any particular languages; a concept is something that all
languages, insofar as they are capable of expressing the concept, have in
common. Thus, philosophers who stress that it is concepts that they analyze
attempt to rebut the charge that their problems and solutions are merely verbal. |
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In contrast, other Analytic philosophers
have been concerned with how expressions are used in a particular, nontechnical,
everyday language. Thus, the term ordinary language
philosophy has been applied by critics as a term of opprobrium to such
philosophers. An influential study, The
Concept of Mind (1949), by Gilbert Ryle,
a prominent Oxford Analyst, is an example of a work that some critics took to
depend in large part on a trivial appeal to how English speakers talk; but many
of Ryle's arguments could equally well have been given by Analytic philosophers
who would look upon the term ordinary language with horror. |
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The problem of perception
illustrates how Analytic philosophers who do conceptual analysis think of the
goal of philosophy as both different from and complementary to science.
Physiologists, psychologists, and physicists--through experiments, observations,
and testable theories--have also contributed to man's understanding of
perception. There is in the sciences, however, a strong tendency to advance
beyond earlier positions, which seems to be absent from philosophy. In
philosophy, for example, the account of perception given by such 20th-century
Analytic philosophers as G.E. Moore and the Positivist A.J. Ayer has a close
connection with that of Locke in the 17th century. |
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The difference between philosophy and science
is that, whereas the scientist investigates an actual occurrence, such as
seeing, the philosopher investigates a concept that he already possesses quite
independently of what he might discover through the occurrence. Whereas the
scientist begins by supposing that he can recognize examples of seeing and is
already exercising the concept, the philosopher wants to know what is involved
in seeing in the sense of what conditions one can use to classify cases as
examples of seeing. He may want to know, for example, whether certain conditions
are necessary or sufficient. In testing the philosophical theory that, for an
observer to see an object, the object must cause a visual experience in him (the
causal theory of perception), one does not set up a scientific experiment. It
would be of no use to set up situations in which various physical objects are
not causing any visual experiences in order to see whether they still can be
seen. For if the theory is correct, no such experimental situation will be an
instance of seeing; and if it is wrong, merely describing a hypothetical
situation would suffice. The question is one about how situations are
classified, and for that purpose hypothetical situations are as good as real
ones. |
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For some philosophers in the Analytic
tradition, especially those influenced by Wittgenstein, the analysis of concepts
has therapeutic value beyond the intrinsic enjoyment of doing it. Even
scientists and laymen in their philosophical moments generate problems by not
understanding the proper analyses of the concepts that they employ. They are
then tempted to formulate theories to explain these difficulties, when instead
they should be sorting out the roles of the concepts, which would show them that
there was no problem to begin with. Thus, the failure to see how psychological
concepts--sensations, emotions, and desires--are employed has led philosophers
to such problems as how one can know what is going on in another's mind or how
desires and emotions can produce physical changes in the body, and vice versa.
Analysis of the concepts involved would, in this way of looking at philosophy,
"dissolve" rather than solve the problems, for philosophers would come
to see that their formulations of the problem rest on mistakes about the
concepts involved. |
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This way of looking at philosophy has
often been criticized as making it merely a clearing up of the confusions of
other philosophers and therefore a sterile enterprise. The confusions, however,
need not be only those of other philosophers. Scientists, for example, can also
generate philosophical theories that affect how they design their experiments,
which may, thus, be subjects for philosophical therapeutics. Behaviorism in
psychology--which views emotions, desires, and attitudes as being dispositions
to behave in certain ways--seems to be a philosophical theory and perhaps to be
based on a confusion about the analysis of psychological concepts. Yet
Behaviorism has influenced psychologists in their approach to the science. Thus,
in this view, philosophy can have a therapeutic value beyond the sphere of
philosophical games. (see also behaviourism) |
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Philosophy, in spite of its
abstractness, has traditionally been concerned with human needs, and the
therapeutic model may even fulfill this ideal. Laymen, as well as philosophers,
for example, are bothered by the thought that their actions are determined not
by themselves but by prior conditions. This is a problem that, if the
therapeutic view is correct, rests on the misunderstanding of such concepts as
causation, responsibility, and action, which need clarification. |
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The role of language as a central
concern of Analytic philosophers is the dimension most involved in disputes
about the methodology employed. Philosophers outside the Analytic movement tend
to think that its preoccupation with language is a departure from philosophy as
classically conceived. Yet Plato and Aristotle, medieval philosophers, the
Empiricists--and, in fact, most of the philosophers whose works have been
considered important--have found it essential to talk about language. There are
serious differences, however, about what role language should play. One such
difference concerns the importance of formal languages
(in the sense employed in symbolic logic) for philosophical problems. |
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Since the time of Aristotle, logic
has been allied to philosophy. Until the late 19th century, however, logic was
largely confined to formulating elaborate rules for one fairly simple form of
argument--the syllogism; and there was a lack of systematic development of the
subject along lines that had been taken in mathematics
since early times. |
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Almost from the beginning,
mathematicians had rigorously exploited two important techniques: (1) the use of
the axiomatic method (as in Euclid's geometry)
in developing the subject; and (2) the use of schematic letters or variables for
stating general truths in the subject (thus, one can write "A
+ B = B
+ A," in which any names or numbers whatsoever can be substituted
for A and B,
and the result will still be true). |
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It is surprising that logicians through
the ages failed to grasp the power of the use of schematic letters. When they
finally began to employ these and other mathematical techniques, they made great
contributions to man's understanding of the subject. |
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Among the developments that occurred in
the 19th century, primarily through the work of mathematicians, those of the
Englishman George Boole, creator of Boolean
algebra, and of Georg Cantor, the Russian-born
creator of set theory, are especially important inasmuch as they gave promise of
bringing logic and mathematics closer together. The one figure who was both a
mathematician and a philosopher and so might be credited with the marriage of
logic as a philosophical subject with the techniques of mathematics was Gottlob
Frege (died 1925), of the University of Jena in Germany. Historically,
Frege, whose works are now appreciated in their own right, was important
principally for his influence on Bertrand Russell, whose monumental work, Principia
Mathematica (1910-13), written in collaboration with Alfred North
Whitehead, together with Russell's earlier Principles
of Mathematics (1903), awakened philosophers to the fact that the use of
mathematical techniques in logic might prove to be of great importance for
philosophy. Its symbolism had the advantage of being closely connected with
ordinary language, whereas its rules can be precisely formulated. Moreover, work
in symbolic logic has produced many distinctions and techniques that can be
applied to ordinary language. |
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Ordinary language, however, seems to
differ from the artificial language of symbolic logic in more respects than its
lack of precisely stated rules. On the surface, it often appears to violate the
rules of symbolic logic. In the English statement "If this is gold
[symbolized by p], then this will
dissolve in aqua regia [symbolized by q],"
for example, which in symbolic logic is expressed in a form known as the
material conditional, p
 q
(in which
 means
"If . . . then . . . "), one of the rules is that the statement is
true whenever "This is gold" is false. In ordinary language, on the
contrary, one would not count the statement as true merely on formal logical
grounds but only if there were some real connection in the world of chemical
reactions between being gold and dissolving in aqua regia--a connection that
plays no role in symbolic logic. |
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Among Analytic philosophers the
existence of many such apparent divergences between symbolic logic and ordinary
language has generated attitudes ranging from complete mistrust of symbolic
logic as relevant to nonartificial languages to the position that ordinary
language is not a proper vehicle for the rigorous statement of scientific
truths. |
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Symbolic logic has been viewed by many
Analytic philosophers as providing the framework for an ideal or perfect
language. This statement can be taken in two ways: (see also ideal
language) |
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1. Russell and the early Wittgenstein
thought of logic as revealing, in a precise fashion, the real structure of any
language. Any seeming departure from this structure in ordinary language must
therefore be attributed to the fact that its surface grammar fails to reveal its
real structure and is apt to be misleading. As a corollary, philosophers who
have held this view have often explained philosophical problems as arising from
being taken in by the surface features of the language. Because of the
similarity of sentences such as "Tigers bite" and "Tigers
exist," for example, the verb "to exist" may seem to function, as
other verbs do, to predicate something of the subject. It may seem, then, that
existence is a property of tigers just as their biting is. In symbolic logic,
however, the symbolic equivalent of the two sentences would be quite different;
existence would not be represented by a symbol for a predicate but by what is
called the existential quantifier, (
x), which means "There exists at
least one x such that . . . ." |
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2. The other sense in which symbolic
logic has been seen as the framework of an ideal language is exemplified in the
work of Rudolf Carnap, a 20th-century
semanticist, who was concerned with what the best language--especially the best
for the purposes of science--is. |
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One distinctive feature of the formal
language of Principia Mathematica is
that it becomes, when interpreted, a language of true-or-false statements. In
ordinary language, on the contrary, one is not restricted to statements of
truths; in it one can also issue commands, ask questions, make promises, express
beliefs, give permission, and assert necessities and possibilities.
Consequently, many philosophers have developed nonstandard logics that
incorporate the nonassertoric features of language. Thus, various systems of
logic have been formulated and studied (see LOGIC ). |
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On the other side of the coin, many
philosophers--most notably the later Wittgenstein and those influenced by
him--have thought that attempting to put language into the straitjacket of a
formal system is to falsify the way that language works. Language performs a
multitude of tasks, and even among expressions that seem to be alike in the way
they function--those sentences, for example, that one might think are used
simply for expressing facts--examination of their actual use reveals many
differences: differences, for instance, in what is counted as showing them to be
true or false and in their relationships to other parts of language. Formal
systems, according to this view, at best oversimplify and at worst can lead to
philosophical problems generated by supposing that all language operates
strictly according to a simple set of rules. Accordingly, far from settling
philosophical disputes by getting underneath the misleading exterior of ordinary
language, formal systems add their own share of confusion. |
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During the last decades of the 19th
century, English philosophy was dominated by an absolute
Idealism that stemmed from the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. For
English philosophy this represented a break in an almost solid tradition of
Empiricism. The seeds of modern Analytic philosophy were sown when two of the
most important figures in its history, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, broke
with Idealism at the turn of the 20th century. |
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Absolute Idealism was avowedly
metaphysical in the sense that its adherents thought of themselves as
describing, in a way not open to scientists, certain very fundamental truths
about the world. Indeed, what pass for truths in the sciences, were, in their
view, not really truths at all; for the scientist must, perforce, treat the
world as composed of distinct objects and can only describe and state the
relationships supposedly holding among them. But the Idealists held that to talk
about reality as if it were a multiplicity of objects is to falsify it; in the
end only the whole, the absolute, has reality. |
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In their conclusions and, most
importantly, in their methodology, the Idealists were decidedly not on the side
of commonsense intuition. Thus, a Cambridge philosopher, J.M.E.
McTaggart, argued that the concept of time is inconsistent and cannot
therefore be exemplified in reality. British Empiricism, on the other hand, had
always thought of common sense as an ally and science as the model of the way in
which to find out about the world. Even when their views might seem out of step
with common sense, the Empiricists were generally concerned to reconcile the
two. |
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One can hardly claim that Analytic
philosophers have universally thought of themselves as on the side of common
sense and much less that metaphysical conclusions (on the ultimate nature of
reality) are absent from their writings. But there is in the history of the
Analytic movement a strong antimetaphysical strain, and its exponents have
generally assumed that the methods of science and of everyday life are the
authentic ways of finding out the truth. |
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The first break from the Idealist view
that the physical world is really only a world of appearances occurred when
Moore, in a paper, "The Nature of Judgment" (1899), argued for a
theory of truth that implies that the physical world has the independent
existence that, apart from philosophical theories, it is naively supposed to
have. Though the theory was soon abandoned, it did represent a return to common
sense. |
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The influences on Russell and Moore--and
thus their methods of dealing with problems--soon diverged, and their different
approaches became the roots of two broadly different methodologies in the
Analytic tradition. |
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Russell was a major influence on those
who approached philosophical problems armed with the technical equipment of
formal logic, who saw the physical sciences as the only means of gaining
knowledge of the world, and who regarded philosophy--if a science at all--as a
deductive and a priori enterprise on a par with mathematics. Russell's
contributions to this side of the Analytic tradition have been important and, in
great part, lasting. |
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Moore, on the other hand, never found
much need to employ technical tools nor to turn philosophy into a science. His
dominant themes were (1) the defense of commonsensical views about the nature of
the world against esoteric, skeptical, or grandly metaphysical views and (2) the
conviction that the right way to approach philosophical puzzles is to ask
exactly what the question is that generated the puzzle before trying to solve
it. Philosophical problems, he thought, are often intractable because
philosophers have not stopped to formulate precisely what is at issue. |
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Because of these two themes, Moore
enlisted much more sympathy among Analytic philosophers from the 1930s and
onward who were followers of Wittgenstein's later writings, of Gilbert Ryle's
postwar The Concept of Mind, and of
John Austin's work (see below Oxford
philosophers ). These philosophers,
like Moore, saw little hope in advanced formal logic as a means of solving
traditional philosophical problems and believed that philosophical skepticism
about the existence of an independent external world or of other minds--or, in
general, about what men label as common sense--must be wrong. The followers of
Wittgenstein also shared with Moore the belief that it is often more important
to look at the questions that philosophers pose than at their proposed answers.
Thus, unlike Russell, who was important for his solutions in formal logic and
ideal models of language, it was more the spirit of Moore's conception of
philosophy than its lasting contributions that makes him a seminal influence. |
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The Idealists were given to arguing for
what, in Moore's eyes, were outrageous positions. Thus, in his essay "A
Defence of Common Sense" (1925), as in others, his defense was not only
against such Idealist doctrines as the unreality of time but also against any of
the forms of skepticism--about the existence of
other minds or of a material world--that philosophers have espoused. The
skeptic, he pointed out, usually has some argument for his conclusion. Instead
of examining such arguments, however, Moore pitted against the skeptic's
premises quite everyday beliefs, such as, for example, that he had breakfast
that morning (thus time cannot be unreal) or that he does in fact have a pencil
in his hand (thus there must be a material world). His challenge to the skeptic
is to show that the premises of the skeptic's argument are more certain than the
everyday beliefs that form Moore's premises. |
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Although some commentators have seen
Moore as an early practitioner of the appeal to "ordinary language,"
his appeal was really not to what it is proper to say but rather to the beliefs
of common sense. His rejection of anything that offends against common sense,
however, was influential not only in the release that it afforded from the
metaphysical excesses of absolute Idealism but also in its impact on the
continuing attitudes of most Analytic philosophers--even though they may have
given it a linguistic turn. |
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Moore was also important for his vision
of the proper business of philosophy--analysis. He was puzzled about what is the
proper analysis of "X sees Y,"
in which Y designates a physical object (e.g.,
a pencil). There must be a special sense of "see," in which one
does not see the pencil but only part of its surface. And finally--and most
importantly--there is also a sense in which what is directly perceived is not
even the surface of the pencil but, rather, what Moore called "sense
data" and which earlier Empiricists had called "visual
sensations" or "sense impressions." Moore's problem was to
discern the relationships among these various elements in perception and, in
particular, to discover how a person can be justified, as Moore fully believed
he is, in his claims to see physical objects when what he immediately perceives
are really sense data. The idea that sense impressions form the immediate
objects of perception has played a large role in Analytic philosophy, showing
once again its Empiricist roots. It later became an important source of
division, however, among the Logical Positivists (see below Logical
Positivism and Logical Empiricism ).
Most post-World War II Oxford philosophers, however, together with those closely
influenced by Wittgenstein's later work, have found sense data to be as
unpalatable and unwarranted as Moore had found McTaggert's doctrine of the
unreality of time to be. (see also sense-datum) |
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One of the recurring themes in
philosophy is the idea that the subject needs to be given a new methodology.
Among Empiricists this has often meant making it more scientific. From an early
date, Russell enunciated this viewpoint (which was not shared by Moore), finding
in the techniques of symbolic logic a measure of reassurance that philosophy
might be put on a new basis. Russell did not see the philosopher, however, as
merely a logician. Symbolic logic might provide the framework for a perfect
language, but the content of that language is something else. The job of the
philosopher is--for Russell, as it was for Moore--analysis.
But the purpose is somewhat different. In most of Russell's work, analysis has
the task of uncovering the necessary assumptions--especially about the kinds of
things that exist--for a description of the world as it is. For the most part
this description is the one that science gives and is therefore realistic. Thus,
Russell's use of analysis was openly metaphysical. |
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The question then arises of how
philosophical analysis, which is concerned with how men talk about the world,
can presume to give any answers about how the world is. The search for an answer
begins with the above-mentioned theory of descriptions--a theory that seems to
be closely tied to linguistic concerns. It will be recalled that Russell
considered that such definite descriptions as
"the author of 'On Denoting' " are not really expressions used to
refer to things in the world but that, instead, they make the statements in
which they occur into quite general propositions about the world, to the effect
that one and only one thing of a certain sort exists and that it has a certain
property. Because there must be some way, however, of directly speaking of the
things in the world, Russell turned his attention to proper names.
The name Aristotle, for example, does not seem to carry any descriptive
content. But Russell argues, on the contrary, that ordinary names are really
concealed definite descriptions ("Aristotle" may simply mean "The
student of Plato who taught Alexander, wrote the Metaphysics,
etc."). If a name had no descriptive content, one could not sensibly
ask about the existence of its bearer, for one could then not understand what is
expressed by a statement involving it. If "Bosco" were a name in this
sense (without any descriptive content), then merely to understand the statement
that Bosco exists or the statement that Bosco does not exist presupposes that
one already knows what the name Bosco refers to. But then there cannot be any
genuine question about Bosco's existence, for just to understand the question
one must know the thing to which the name refers. Ordinary proper names,
however--Russell, Homer, Aristotle, and Santa Claus--as Russell pointed out, are
such that it makes sense to question the existence of their bearers. Thus,
ordinary names must be concealed descriptions and cannot be the means of
directly referring to the particular things in the world. |
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Names in the strict logical sense, then,
are very rare; Russell, in fact, suggests that in English the only possible
candidates are the demonstrative pronouns, this
and that. Yet, if men are ever to talk about the actual things in the world
directly, there must be the possibility of such demonstrative expressions
underlying their language--in their private thoughts about the world if not in
their public language. |
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To this point, Russell had concluded
that things in the world can be talked about only through the medium of a
special kind of name; in particular, one about which no question can arise
whether it names something or not. At this point there was a transition from
questions about the nature of language to results about the nature of the world.
Russell asked what sort of thing it is that can be named in the strict logical
sense, that can be known and talked about, and that can tell a man something
about the world. The important restriction is that no question can arise about
whether it exists or not. Ordinary physical objects and other people seem not to
fit this requirement. |
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In his search for something whose
existence cannot be questioned, Russell hit upon present experience and, in
particular, upon sense data: one can question whether he is really seeing some
physical object--whether, for example, there is a desk before him--but a person
cannot question that he has had visual impressions or sense data; thus, what a
man can name in the strict logical sense and what things he can actually talk
about turn out to be the elements of his present experience. Russell therefore
made a distinction between what can be known by acquaintance and what can be
known only by description; i.e., between
those things the existence of which cannot be doubted and those about which, at
least theoretically, doubt can be raised. What is novel about Russell's
conclusion is that it was arrived at from a fairly technical analysis of
language: to be directly acquainted with something is to be in a position to
give it a name in the strict logical sense, and to know something only by
description is to know only that something uniquely fits the description. |
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Russell was not constant in his view
about physical objects. At one point he thought that the observer must infer
their existence as the best hypothesis to explain his experience. Later he
argued that they could be taken as logical constructions out of sense data. |
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The next important development in
Analytic philosophy was initiated when Russell published a series of articles
entitled "Philosophy of Logical Atomism" (1918-19), in which he
acknowledged a debt to Wittgenstein, who had studied with Russell before the
war. Wittgenstein's own work, the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus (1922), which can also justly be said to present
a logical atomism, turned out to be not only tremendously influential on
developments in Analytic philosophy but also such a deep and difficult text that
it has generated a growing body of scholarly interpretation. |
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Russell's choice of the words logical
atomism to describe this viewpoint was, in fact, particularly apt. By using the
word logical Russell meant to sustain the position, described earlier, that
through analysis--particularly with the aid of the ideal structure provided by symbolic
logic--the fundamental truths about how any language functions can be
revealed and that this disclosure, in turn, would show the fundamental structure
of that which the language is used to describe. And by using the word atomism
Russell highlighted the particulate nature of the results that his analyses and
those of Wittgenstein seemed to yield. |
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On the linguistic level, the atoms in
question are atomic propositions, the simplest
statements that it is possible to make about the world; and on the level of what
language talks about, the atoms are the simplest atomic facts, those expressible
by atomic propositions. More complex
propositions, called molecular propositions, can then be built up out of atomic
propositions via logical connectives--such as "either . . . or . . .
," "both . . . and . . . ," and "not . . ."--the
truth-value of the molecular proposition being in each case a function of the
truth values of its component atomic propositions. |
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Language, then, must break down, upon
analysis, into ultimate elements that cannot be analyzed into any other
component propositions; and, insofar as language mirrors reality, the world must
then be composed of facts that are utterly simple. Atomic propositions are
composed, however, of strings of names understood, as Russell had explained it,
in the strict logical sense; and atomic facts are composed of simple objects,
the things that could be thus named. |
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The details of the Russell-Wittgenstein
view have fascinated philosophers by the way in which they not only formed a
coherent view but also seemed to follow inexorably from the central assumptions.
There are close connections between this period, which was perhaps the most
metaphysical in contemporary Analytic philosophy, and traditional Empiricism.
The breakdown of language and the world into atomic elements had been one of the
prominent features in the classical Empiricists, John Locke, George Berkeley,
and David Hume. There was also a view of the connection between language and the
world--adumbrated in Russell but fully evident in the Tractatus--which
has been important and influential, viz., the picture
theory, which holds that the structure of language mirrors that of the
world. Analysis is important because ordinary language does not show
immediately, for example, that it is founded on the atomic-molecular proposition
model. Another theme is that the deductive sciences--mathematics and logic--are
based solely on the way that language operates and cannot reveal any truths
about the world, not even about a world of entities called numbers. Finally,
logical atomism, in Wittgenstein's thought as opposed to Russell's, was at one
and the same time metaphysical--in the sense of conveying via pure reasoning
something about how the world is--and antimetaphysical. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is unique in the history of Empiricism in its acceptance
of the fact that it is itself a metaphysic and that part of its metaphysics is
that metaphysics is impossible: the Tractatus
says of itself that what it says cannot be coherently said. Only empirical
science can tell a man anything about the world as it is. Yet the Tractatus
apparently tells him, for example, about the relationship between language
and the facts of the world. For Wittgenstein, the solution of this seeming
paradox lies in his distinction between what can be said and what can only be
shown. There are certain things that can somehow be seen to be so--in
particular, the ways in which language is connected with the world. The Tractatus
could not straightforwardly tell its readers about these
matters--metaphysics cannot be a body of facts expressible in any language--but
the attempt to say these things, done in the right way, can show them what it
cannot coherently express. |
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Wittgenstein's Tractatus was both a landmark in the history of contemporary
Analytic philosophy and perhaps its most aberrant example. It not only contained
the most highly sophisticated metaphysics but also was an important influence on
the most antimetaphysical of the positions taken by Analytic philosophers, viz.,
that of Logical Positivism, which was mainly
developed by a group of philosophers, scientists, and logicians who were centred
in Vienna and came to be known as the Vienna Circle.
Among these, Rudolf Carnap and Moritz
Schlick have perhaps had the most influence on Anglo-American philosophy,
although it was an English philosopher, A.J. Ayer--whose
Language, Truth
and Logic (1936) is still the most widely read work of the movement
in America and England--who introduced the ideas of Logical Positivism to
English philosophy. Its main tenets have struck sympathetic chords in the
Analytic philosophers and are still important today, even if in repudiation. |
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Above all else, Logical Positivism was
antimetaphysical; nothing can be learned about the world, it held, except
through the methods of the empirical sciences. The Positivists sought a method
for showing both (1) when a theory that seemed to be about the world was really
metaphysical and (2) that such a theory was, in fact, meaningless, and this they
found in the principle of verification. In its positive form, the principle said
that the meaning of any statement that is really about the world is given by the
methods employed for verifying its truth or falsity--the only allowable methods
being, ultimately, those of observation and experiment. In its negative form,
the principle said that no statement could both be a statement about the world
and have no method of verification attached to it. Its negative form was the
weapon used against metaphysics and for the vindication of science as the only
possible source of knowledge about the world. The principle would, thus, class
as meaningless many philosophical and religious theories that purport to say
something about the world but provide no way of testing the truth of the
statements; for example, in religion it would render suspect the statement that
God exists, which, being metaphysical, would be, strictly speaking, meaningless.
(see also verifiability principle) |
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The principle of verification ran almost
immediately into difficulties, most of which were first raised by the
Positivists themselves. The attempt to work out these difficulties belongs to a
more detailed study of the movement (see below Positivism and Logical Empiricism
). It is sufficient to note here that these problems were sufficient to
make most subsequent Analytic philosophers wary of appealing directly to the
principle. It has, however, influenced philosophical work in more subtle ways. |
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With the principle of verification in
hand, the Positivists thought that they could show a great many theories to be
nonsense. There were several areas of discourse, however, which failed the test
of the principle but which were simply impossible to rule out as concealed
nonsense. Foremost among these disciplines were mathematics and ethics.
Mathematics (and logic) could hardly be written off as nonsense. Yet their
theorems are not verifiable by observation and experiment; they are known, in
fact, by pure a priori reasoning alone. The answer seemed to be provided in
Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which held
that the propositions of mathematics and logic are, in Kantian terms, analytic; i.e.,
true--like the statement "All bachelors are unmarried"--in virtue
of the conventions that lie behind the use of the symbols involved. (see also analytic
proposition , a priori knowledge) |
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About ethics
or, more precisely, about any statements involving value judgments, the
Positivist view was different, yet still of lasting importance. In this view,
value judgments are not, like mathematical truths, necessary adjuncts to
science. But they cannot be put off as nonsense; nor, obviously, are they true
by definition or linguistic convention. The usual view of the Positivists,
called emotivism, is that what look like
statements of fact (e.g., that one
should not tell lies) are really expressions
of one's feelings toward a certain action; thus, value judgments are not
really true or false. The Positivist's position was that neither mathematical
nor ethical statements could be dismissed, as were metaphysical propositions.
Both had then to be exempted from the principle of verification; and this was
done by arguing that their statements are not really about the world:
mathematical truths are conventions, and ethical statements are merely
expressions of feelings. The divorce of ethics from science, once again,
reflects an old Empiricist theme, to be seen, for example, in David Hume's
dictum that from matters of fact one cannot derive a conclusion about what ought
to be nor vice versa. (see also axiology) |
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A crucial turn that initiated
developments that were destined to have a lasting and profound effect on much of
contemporary Analytic philosophy occurred in 1929, when Wittgenstein, after some
years in Austria during which he was not philosophically very active, returned
to England and established his residence at Cambridge. There, the direction of
his thought soon shifted radically away from his Tractatus,
and his views became in many ways diametrically opposed to those of logical
atomism. Because he published none of the materials of this period, his
influence on other English philosophers--and ultimately on those in all of the
countries associated with Analytic philosophy--spread by way of his students and
those who heard him in the small groups to whom he spoke at Cambridge. His
style, too, changed from the semi-rigorous and formally organized propositions
of the Tractatus to sets of loosely
connected paragraphs and remarks in which the ideas are often conveyed more by
suggestion and example than discursively. The result has been that one of the
major splits within the ranks of Analytic philosophy is that between those who
derive their methods from the later Wittgenstein and those who have followed the
Tractatus. (see also "Philosophical
Investigations," ) |
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Although Wittgenstein's thoughts ranged
over almost the entire field of philosophy, from the philosophy of mathematics
to ethics and aesthetics, their impact has been felt most, perhaps, where it has
concerned the nature of language and the relationship between the mental and the
physical. |
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In logical atomism, as shown above,
language was conceived as having a certain necessary and fairly simple
underlying structure that it was the job of philosophy to expose. Wittgenstein
began to tear away at this assumption. Language, he now thought, is like an
instrument that can be used for an indefinite number of purposes. Hence, any
effort to codify how it must operate by giving some small set of rules would be
like supposing that there is some rigid necessity that a screwdriver (for
instance) can be used only to drive screws and forgetting that screwdrivers are
also, quite successfully, used to open jars and to jimmy windows. Language is a
human institution that is not bound by an outside set of rules--only by what men
consider to be correct and incorrect. And that, in turn, is not really a matter
for a priori theories to consider. |
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The notion of a rule and what it means
to follow a rule was especially prominent in his writings. Several concerns made
this point of particular interest to Wittgenstein. In mathematics and logic,
emphasis was being placed on the rules for manipulating the symbolism. As has
been seen, symbolic logic has also been a model for the underlying structure of
language. If this fact is coupled with the fact that Russell and the
Wittgenstein of the Tractatus saw
language as reflecting these rules and with the general Empiricist tradition
that explains how language operates by each person following internal rules and
standards for the use of his words, the picture of the system that Wittgenstein
thought mistaken then emerges, and it becomes clear why he placed the notion of
a rule so centrally. |
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Natural languages, however, are
significantly different in that one does not first learn the rules and then use
the language; indeed, prior to learning the language, one would not know what to
do with rules. Mathematics and logic are, in this sense, bad models for language
because they aim at setting out before hand the rules and principles that are
subsequently to be used. They encourage the belief that language must have a
rigid structure and that, without rules, no language would be possible. The
"rules" that one might plausibly discern in the language that one
speaks are not, as rules, already there, in a ghostly way, guiding what one
says; they are either generalizations from the finite data of what is counted as
correct or incorrect, or they are rules that, as Wittgenstein metaphorically
expressed it, one puts away in the archives--one adopts the rule but only after
the fact. |
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Following a rule, however, was a concept
that Wittgenstein saw as wrongly analyzed in many classical views about
language. Thus, he cast irrevocable doubt on the prevalent theory--typified
best, perhaps, in John Locke's Essay
Concerning Human Understanding
(1690)--that to use an expression meaningfully is to have in one's
mind a standard or a rule for applying it correctly. Against this theme,
Wittgenstein's point was that a rule by itself is dead--it is like a ruler in
the hands of someone who has never learned to use it, a mere stick of wood.
Rules cannot compel nor even guide a person unless he knows how to use them; and
the same is true about mental images, which have often been thought to provide
the standard for using linguistic expressions. But if rules themselves do not
give life to words but require a similar explanation for what gives them life,
then there is a useless regress and no (philosophical) explanatory value in the
whole apparatus of internal rules and standards. |
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In some respects, Wittgenstein made some
significant breaks with the Empiricist
tradition--in his views about language and the explanation of the rigour of the
deductive sciences. His treatment of the relationship between mental events and
physical events also represents an important departure. Empiricists generally
have started from the important assumption that what a person is immediately
acquainted with is his own sensations, ideas, and volitions, and that these are
mental and not physical; and, most importantly, that the things he knows
immediately are essentially private and inaccessible to others. For both Moore
and Russell there then arose the problem of how, in view of the privacy stressed
by the sense-datum theory, the world of physical objects could be known.
Wittgenstein's attack on this viewpoint, which has come to be known as "the
private language" argument, has become well
known, partly because it was in this area that Wittgenstein presented what could
most easily be picked out as a more or less formal argument--one that could then
be analyzed and criticized in an analytic manner. Even in this case, however,
his style of writing was such that his precise formulation of the argument has
become a main source of controversy. Wittgenstein argued that the notion of an
utterly private experience would imply: (1) that what goes on in the mental life
of a person could be talked about only in a language that that person alone
whose mental life it was could understand; (2) that such a private language
would be no language at all (this has been the main source of controversy); and
(3) that the widely held doctrine that there are absolutely private mental
events cannot be intelligibly stated, because to do so would be to suppose that
one can publically say something about what the doctrine itself says cannot be
mentioned in a language accessible to more than one person. |
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The fact that Wittgenstein's argument
against private language depends essentially on the question, "What is it
to follow a rule?" illustrates a common characteristic of his writings,
viz., that themes developed in one area of philosophy continually emerge in
apparently quite divorced areas. His extraordinary ability to see a common
source of difficulty in philosophical problems that seem to be unrelated helps
to explain his style of writing, which seems at first sight to be a somewhat
chaotic arrangement of ideas. |
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Analytic philosophy has also been
attracted to a behaviouristic view of mental phenomena that holds that such
apparently private events as the feeling of fear are not only not really private
but also that they can be identified with publicly observable patterns of
behaviour. The disposition toward empirical science, with observation as its
foundation, united with the observation that the evidence men have of what goes
on in the mental lives of other people must come from what they see of their
behaviour, has often warred against the other inclination of Empiricism to
regard the starting point of all knowledge of the world, for each person, as
being essentially private sense experience. Wittgenstein has had tremendous
influence, however, in suggesting that these two extremes are not the only
alternatives. Yet attempts to state how Wittgenstein could deny the privacy of
experience without espousing some form of behaviourism
have not been very successful. Sympathetic interpreters have taken up the notion
of "criteria," used, but not developed in any detail, by Wittgenstein.
For mental states such as fear, outward behaviour (e.g.,
running away, blanching, or cringing) does not constitute what it is to be
in that state, as behaviourism would have it, but neither is it merely evidence
of some completely private event. The problem has been to characterize the
relation between behaviour and mental states so that the two are neither
identical nor evidence one for the other, while still acknowledging that a
knowledge of the person's characteristic behaviour is essential to understanding
the notion of a certain mental state. |
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Those philosophers who might fairly be
labelled "Wittgensteinians," who follow the methods that Wittgenstein
employed in his later period, should be distinguished from those who have been
influenced more indirectly by the general trends and philosophical atmosphere
that arose in large part from Wittgenstein's work. |
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Close students of his ideas have tended
to work chiefly on particular concepts that lie at the core of traditional
philosophical problems. As an example of such an investigation, a monograph
entitled Intention (1957), by G.E.M.
Anscombe, an editor of Wittgenstein's posthumous works, may be cited as
an extended study of what it is for a person to intend to do something and of
what the relationship is between his intention and the actions that he performs.
This work has occupied a central place in a growing literature about human
actions, which in turn has influenced views about the nature of psychology, of
the social sciences, and of ethics. And, as an extension of this British
influence into the United States, one of Wittgenstein's students, Norman
Malcolm of Cornell University, has investigated such concepts as
knowledge, certainty, memory, and dreaming. As these topics suggest,
Wittgensteinians have tended to concentrate on Wittgenstein's ideas about the
nature of mental concepts and to work in the area of philosophical psychology.
Typically, they begin with classical philosophical theories and attack them by
arguing that they employ some key concept, such as that of knowledge, in a
manner incongruous with the way in which the concept would actually be employed
in various situations. Their works thus abound with descriptions of
hypothetical, though usually homely, situations and with questions of the form,
"What would a person say if . . .?" or "Would one call this a
case of X ?" In doing so, they are following out Wittgenstein's advice
that, instead of trying to capture the essence of a concept by an abstract
analysis, the philosopher should look at how it is employed in a variety of
situations. |
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After World War II, Oxford University
was the centre of extraordinary philosophical activity; and, although
Wittgenstein's general outlook on philosophy--his turning away, for example,
from the notion of formal methods in philosophical analysis--was an important
ingredient, many of the Oxford philosophers could not be called Wittgensteinians
in the strict sense. The method employed by many of these philosophers has often
been characterized--especially by critics--as an "appeal to ordinary
language," and they were thus identified as belonging to the school of
"ordinary language" philosophy. Exactly what this form of argument is
supposed to be and what exemplifies it in the writings of these philosophers has
been by no means clear. Gilbert Ryle, Moore's
successor as editor of a leading journal, Mind--and
especially in his The Concept of Mind--was
among the most prominent of those analysts who were regarded as using ordinary
language as a philosophical tool. Ryle, like Wittgenstein, pointed out the
mistake of regarding the mind as what he called
"a ghost in a machine"--to defeat the radical dualism of mind and body
that has characterized much of philosophical thinking--by investigating how
people employ a variety of concepts, such as memory, perception, and
imagination, that designate "mental" properties. He tried to show
that, when philosophers carry out such investigations, they find that, roughly
speaking, it is the way people act and behave that leads to attributing these
properties to them, and that there is no involvement of anything internally
private. He also attempted to show how philosophers have come to dualistic
conclusions--usually from having a wrong model in terms of which to interpret
human activities. A dualistic model may be constructed, for example, by wrongly
supposing that an intelligently behaving person must be continually utilizing
knowledge of facts--knowledge that something is the case. Ryle contended, on the
contrary, that much intelligent behaviour is a matter of knowing how to do
something and that, once this fact is acknowledged, there is no temptation to
explain the behaviour by looking for a private internal knowledge of facts.
Though Ryle's objectives were similar to those of Wittgenstein, his results have
often seemed more behavioristic than Wittgenstein's. (see also mind-body
dualism) |
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It is true that Ryle did ask, in pursuit
of his method, some fairly detailed questions about when a person would say, for
example, that someone had been imagining something; but it is by no means clear
that he was appealing to ordinary language in
the sense that his was an investigation into how, say, speakers of English use
certain expressions. In any case, the charge, often voiced by critics, that this
style of philosophizing trivializes and perverts philosophy from its traditional
function would probably also have to be levelled against Aristotle, who
frequently appealed to "what we would say." |
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A powerful philosophical figure among
postwar Oxford philosophers was John Austin, who
was White's professor of moral philosophy until his death, in 1960. Austin felt
that many philosophical theories derive their plausibility from overlooking
distinctions--often very fine--between different uses of expressions, and he
also thought that philosophers too frequently think that any one of a number of
expressions will do just as well for their purposes. (Thus, ignoring the
difference between an illusion and a delusion, for example, gives credence to
the view that what one immediately perceives are not physical objects, but sense
data.) Austin's work was, in many respects, much closer to the ideal of
philosophy as comprising the analysis of concepts
than was that of Ryle or Wittgenstein. He was also much more concerned with the
nature of language itself and with general theories of how it functions. This
novel approach, as exemplified in How to
Do Things with Words (1962), set a trend that has been followed out in a
growing literature in the philosophy of language. Austin took the total speech
act as the starting point of analysis, which allowed him to make distinctions
based not only upon words and their place in a language but also upon such
points as the speaker's intentions in making the utterance and its expected
effect on the audience. There was also in Austin's approach something of the
program of Russell and the early Wittgenstein for laying bare the fundamental
structure of language. |
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Although the Oxford philosophers and the
posthumous publication of Wittgenstein's
writings have produced a revolution in Anglo-American philosophy, the branch of
Analytic philosophy that emphasized formal analyses by means of modern logic has
by no means been dormant. Since the appearance of Principia Mathematica, striking new findings have emerged in logic,
many of which, though requiring for their understanding a high level of
mathematical sophistication, are nevertheless important for philosophy. |
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Among those philosophers for whom symbolic
logic occupies a central position, W.V.O. Quine,
Pierce professor of philosophy at Harvard University, has been especially
important. Symbolic logic represented for him, as it did for many earlier
Analytic philosophers, the framework for the language of science. There were two
important themes in his work, however, that represent significant departures
from, say, the positions of the logical atomists and the Logical Positivists. In
the first place, Quine rejected the distinction between those statements in
which their truth or falsity depends upon the meaning of the terms involved and
those in which their truth or falsity is a matter of empirical and observable
fact--a distinction that had played an essential role in Logical Positivism and
was thought by most Empiricists to be the basis for a division between the
deductive and the empirical sciences. Quine, in "Two
Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) and subsequent writings, argued that
the sort of distinction intended by philosophers is impossible to draw. In the
course of his argument, a similar doubt was cast upon concepts traditional not
only to philosophy but also to linguistics--in particular, the concept of
synonymy or sameness of meaning. Quine's attack has been a threat not only to
some long-held doctrines of the Analytic tradition but also to its conception of
the nature of philosophy, which has generally depended upon contrasting it with
the empirical sciences. |
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The second important departure of
Quine's philosophy has been his attempt to show that science can be successfully
conducted without what he calls "intentional entities." In contrast to
"extensional," used above as an essential feature of standard symbolic
logic, intentional entities include many of the common items that Analytic
philosophers often assume that they can talk about without difficulty, such as
the meanings of expressions, propositions, or the property of certain statements
(such as those of mathematics) of being necessarily true. Quine's program--as
exemplified by Word
and Object (1960)--is intended in part to show that science can say
everything that it needs to say without using concepts that cannot be expressed
in the extensional language of standard logic. Quine's work, though by no means
widely accepted, has made Analytic philosophers at least wary of uncritically
accepting certain of their standard distinctions. |
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Since the mid-20th century, there has
been an interaction between the science of linguistics
and Analytic philosophy. This did not occur before because Analytic philosophers
had almost always considered their study of language to be a priori and
unconcerned with empirical facts about particular languages. Recently, however,
a book by Noam Chomsky, a U.S. generative
grammarian, entitled Syntactic
Structures (1957), has produced a theory of grammar that not only has
profoundly affected the course of linguistics but also bears striking
resemblances to philosophical analysis. At first, some Analytic philosophers saw
in Chomsky's theory a technique that could be applied to philosophy. It was
subsequently considered, however, that, whereas the possibility of looking at
grammar in Chomsky's way had contributed valuable concepts for philosophers, the
possibility that it would become a methodology for Analytic philosophy had
receded. The interchange between linguists and philosophers, however, has
continued. |
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It is not possible to forecast in any
detail the future trends of Analytic philosophy in Anglo-American and
Scandinavian countries. It seems relatively certain, however, that the two
conceptions of the subject that stem from Moore and Russell will both continue.
(see also metaphysics) |
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Analytic philosophers, mainly influenced
by Oxford philosophy, and those for whom symbolic logic is a touchstone analyze
many of the same problems and benefit from each other's work. Analysis in the
more rigorous sense that Russell's theory of definite descriptions represents is
more frequently an aim, despite the doubts of Wittgenstein and many of the
Oxford philosophers. The general idea that the only ultimate explanations of the
world are the scientific ones and the usual corollary that philosophy is in the
service of science--which was a central idea for Russell,
for the Logical Positivists, and (in recent times) for Quine--has apparently
lost nothing of its vigour. The opposing tendencies, noted above, among
Empiricists in general, and present also in Analytic philosophy, toward
behaviourism or Materialism, on the one hand,
and toward an Idealism of a phenomenalistic sort (such as that of the Irish
bishop George Berkeley), on the other, are not present in the same form--mainly
because of the sustained criticisms of Wittgenstein, of his followers, and of
the Oxford philosophers. The battleground has shifted to a more subtle level. A
substantial number of Analytic philosophers who are styled Materialists or physicalists
have proposed a novel technique for reducing mental events and states to
physical states. They avoid the well-exposed difficulties of older attempts in
which it was held that, when one apparently talks about a separate realm of the
mind--speaking of such things as thoughts, emotions, and sensations--the proper
analysis of its meaning would be in terms of physical properties and events
(usually observable behaviour). The novel idea, on the contrary, is that there
is, in fact, an identity between so-called mental events and certain physical
events, particularly those occurring in the brain, an identity that it is
eventually the task of science to specify--in a way modelled after that in which
science discovered that lightning is identical with an electrical discharge. The
opposition against this new brand of scientific Materialism does not set up
against it a view of the mind as a separate realm coexisting with the physical
nor as an essentially private collection of nonphysical events and objects.
Rather, the issue has been joined on the question whether the language (or
perhaps the concepts) of the psychological and the physical are such as to allow
for a scientifically discovered identity between items of the one and items of
the other. That there still remains a division among Analytic philosophers
concerning the problem of the mental and the physical (though in much altered
form) shows both the continuity of the movement and the changes that have
occurred. (K.S.D.) |
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