Series: A Selective History Of Analytic Philosophy?
"The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“In apprehending a scientific truth we pass, as a rule, through various degrees of certitude.”
As Gottlob Frege writes in his preface to Begriffsschrift (1879), “If it is one of the tasks of philosophy to break the domination of the word over the human spirit by laying bare the misconceptions that through the use of language often almost unavoidably arise concerning the relations between concepts and by freeing thought from that with which only the means of expression of ordinary language, constituted as they are, saddle it, then my ideography, further developed for these purposes, can become a useful tool for the philosopher.”
For the early Frege, their philosophical project was to create a “formula language” for which the task of doing philosophy and arithmetic would be unambiguous. As opposed to ordinary language, what with its inconsistencies and abstractions, this universal system would instead rest on self-sufficient logical laws and crystalline semiotics. The result would be a perfect philosophical language, in which the vagueness of words would be substituted for the simplicity of logical notation, or the lattice of formal symbols.
In gradual steps, Frege sought to continue the work of Gottfried Leibniz’ early universal systems of the Characteristica Universalis, the Calculus Ratiocinator, and similarly, René Descartes’ Mathesis Universalis. For Leibniz and Descartes, the achievement of a universal system would anticipate the solving of philosophy itself. From here, we might begin a selective history of Analytic philosophy.
"The exact treatment of logic in fundamental questions, where symbols fail, has remained very much behind; in your works I find the best I know of our time, and therefore I have permitted myself to express my deep respect to you.”
As part of their “revolt” against British Idealism, the English philosophers, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, disowned the Neo-Hegelian school of thought in 1898, despite its popularity in Britain at the time, and made an analytic turn towards a new philosophy at the beginning of the 20th Century.
As Russell reflects on Moore in his autobiographical essay, My Mental Development (1944), “He also had had a Hegelian period, but it was briefer than mine. He took the lead in rebellion, and I followed, with a sense of emancipation. Bradley argued that everything common sense believes in is mere appearance; we reverted to the opposite extreme, and thought that everything is real that common sense, uninfluenced by philosophy or theology, supposes real. With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them, and also that there is a pluralistic timeless world of Platonic ideas. The world, which had been thin and logical, suddenly became rich and varied and solid. Mathematics could be quite true, and not merely a stage in dialectic.”
In 1903, he had published The Principles of Mathematics—an important early work of Analytic philosophy because it premised a new foundation for mathematical notation. But in 1905, he published On Denoting, a seminal work in the philosophy of language, in which he both builds upon and criticises Frege’s work in Begriffsschrift (1879) and Sense and Reference (1892) to draw a new description-based theory for language.
It is difficult to summarise Analytic works of philosophy—not for a lack of clarity insofar as an abundance of it—but in devising his Theory of Descriptions, Russell proposes that propositional function C(x) can be used to express propositions via variable (x). This introduction of symbolic logic is essential, because in using mathematical notation to express language propositions, Russell believed it would be an unambiguous format in which to conduct and test for the validity of any proposition in general.
After rejecting the German Idealism of Kant and Hegel, Russell’s interest in the logical notation was taken from Giuseppe Peano while the former visited Paris in 1900. With the assistance of the English philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, Russell returned to Britain and co-published the three-volume Principia Mathematica from 1910 to 1913, which employs a novel, symbolic notation to fully express mathematical propositions such as 1 + 1 = 2.
In doing so, Russell and Whitehead created the precedents for predicate and symbolic logic, and bolstered the notion that a formal language is not only necessary, but possible, so as to render out our philosophical propositions in clearer notation without the shortfalls of ordinary language.
“The aim of scientific effort is to reach the goal, unified science, by applying logical analysis to the empirical material.”
In 1929, the Vienna Circle published their manifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World, based on the premises set forth by Frege, Russell, and Whitehead some 20 years before.
Featuring members such as Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel and Karl Menger, the Vienna Circle were a group of scientists and philosophers who had taken the premise of formal logic as the means by which to transform philosophy into an empirical science.
As A.J. Ayer writes in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), “The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical inquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves it to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery.”
The process would be known as Logical Positivism: the position that knowledge of the world ought to be verified a postieri or by analytic means under the criteria of empirical experience. As Ayer contines, “We may accordingly define a metaphysical sentence as a sentence which purports to express a genuine proposition, but does, in fact, express neither a tautology nor an empirical hypothesis. And as tautologies and empirical hypotheses form the entire class of significant propositions, we are justified in concluding that all metaphysical assertions are nonsensical.” In one bold sweep, two thousand years of traditional philosophy are dissolved.
Qualifying themselves as being both “empiricist and positivist”, and that the “scientific world-conception is marked by the application of a certain method”, the Vienna Circle were influential in first half of the 20th Century for their export of Logical Positivism across Europe and America.
Interweaving with the continental milieu of the Berlin Circle—including Hempel and von Mises—and later America and Britain during the exodus caused by the Second World War, the Vienna Circle had nevertheless fallen apart by the start of the post-war period.
Its members had become international—in most cases, for their own safety—and while the ideas of the group remained influential, the new vogue of Ordinary Language Philosophy had risen up in the wake of the post-war and of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investigations in 1953.
“Hence, I sidestepped such questions; no firm doctrine regarding the point should be read into my words.”
For most of the 20th Century, a Descriptivist Theory of Names—otherwise coined by Saul Kripke as the Frege–Russell view—dominated the landscape of language philosophy. While philosophers such as P.F. Strawson and Keith Donnellan had evolved the theories of mediated reference and description, with their works published in 1950 and 1966 respectively, it was the work of the later Wittgenstein, and eventually Kripke, which charted major courses outside the theories of description.
This is not to downplay nor to neglect the contributions of the numerous other philosophers from the post-war era, such as Donald Davidson, David K. Lewis, Hilary Putnam, Gareth Evans, Ruth C. Barcan, Robert Kaplan and so on. As a whole, the second half of the 20th century saw the integration of language philosophy into other fields, such as semiotics, linguistics and even the return of analytic metaphysics and metaethics.
But the significance of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1980) should not be understated. Kripke’s outlining of a causal theory of reference, aided by a modal theory of possible world semantics—as begun by Rudolf Carnap and later advanced by Lewis—broke the levee against the long-accepted descriptivist theory of proper names in the 1980s.
In refuting the Frege-Russell position, new possibilities were opened up for the philosophy of language, such as its implications for the field of semantic externalism, as first mentioned by Putnam in 1973 and 1975. It continues to have its influence in the 21st Century, of which its later legacies have yet to been seen. But here is where our story ends—for now.
Here is the selective timeline of Analytic Philosophy:
1892 – Gottlob Frege publishes Sense and Reference
1905 – Bertrand Russell publishes On Denoting
1936 – A.J. Ayer publishes Language, Truth, and Logic
1944 – Alfred Tarski publishes The Semantic Conception of Truth
1947 – Rudolf Carnap publishes Meaning and Necessity
1950 – P.F. Strawson publishes On Referring
1951 – W. V. O. Quine publishes Two Dogmas of Empiricism
1953 – Ludwig Wittgenstein publishes Philosophical Investigations
1966 – Keith Donnellan publishes Reference and Definite Descriptions
1967 – H.P. Grice delivers Logic and Conversation at Harvard
1970 – Richard Montague publishes Universal grammar
1972 – Donald Davidson publishes Semantics of Natural Language
1973 – David K. Lewis publishes Counterfactuals
1973 – Hilary Putnam publishes Meaning and Reference
1976 – Robert C. Stalnaker publishes Possible Worlds
1980 – Saul Kripke publishes Naming and Necessity
1981 – Gareth Evans publishes Understanding Demonstratives
1987 – Kent Bach publishes Thought and Reference
1989 – Robert Kaplan publishes Demonstratives
1990 – Stephen Neal publishes Descriptions
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2021. All rights reserved.