Appreciating Analytic Philosophy - A Conversation with Scott Soames

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771700863
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

This book is based on an in-depth conversation between Howard Burton and Scott Soames, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern California. Scott Soames is specialized in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy. This detailed conversation provides a detailed introduction to analytic philosophy, including some examples of contemporary relevance to a wide range of other fields. This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, The Utility of Philosophy, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: An Analytical Introduction - From sociological musings to Gottlob FregeInvestigating Logic - The benefits of rigorous inquiryLanguage and Meaning - Minds as gateways to informationLegal Applications - Some concrete examplesChanging the Culture - Philosophy everywhereGödelian Challenges - Making sense of the incompleteness theoremsAbout Ideas Roadshow Conversations: This book is part of a series of 100 Ideas Roadshow Conversations. Presented in an accessible, conversational format, Ideas Roadshow books not only explore frontline academic research featuring world-leading researchers but also reveal the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research.

The Conversation

I. An Analytical Introduction

From sociological musings to Gottlob Frege

HB: I took some courses in philosophy when I was younger. And at the time I distinctly remember picking up this strong bias that North American and British philosophers were the ones who engaged in logical and rigorous approaches, as opposed to those flaky, old-fashioned continentals who talked about all this metaphysical stuff and haven’t fully appreciated the need for logical rigour.

Maybe that was just me, but that was certainly what I was sensing at the time—that the proper way to do things was to roll up one’s sleeves and be analytical and rigorous.

SS: Well, metaphysics used to have a very bad odour at a certain stage of analytic philosophy, roughly up until 1950. Since then metaphysics has taken off.

I was a colleague of David Lewis who was considered one of the leading metaphysicians of the last half of the 20th century. There are a number of people he influenced, and there are many others who are pursuing metaphysics. It’s a burgeoning enterprise.

In my mind, there is no question about whether metaphysics is a legitimate philosophical subject in which we can make progress and come to understand some things. What are the fundamental aspects of reality? What are the most fundamental parts of the universe as we know it? How far can you go in examining that question without simultaneously being a philosopher of physics? There is certainly an important strain in contemporary analytic metaphysics that says, You better be pretty well connected with the most basic empirical science of reality in order to try and make sense of it and fit it into what you think might be a larger picture.

That’s not universally acknowledged, but it’s very widely acknowledged.

HB: Is that point of view growing in popularity?

SS: Yes, it’s definitely growing.

HB: Because from a physicist’s perspective there is often a sense of frustration with these sorts of things. Perhaps you’re a cosmologist and you’re trying to understand the origins of the universe—you’re looking at very large scale, law-like regularities of the universe and how they evolved, say, and you go to a party and meet a philosopher of science who claims to be looking at fundamental questions about space and time, and you think to yourself, Well, that’s what I’m doing. That’s my day job. What are you actually doing that’s any different?

SS: My inclination is to favour the idea that philosophers have something to contribute, but only if they know the empirical science of the matter and can raise questions that the people doing the science can at least appreciate.

They may not be able to entirely pursue those questions themselves. A certain amount of quantum mechanics, for example, is about generating the right set of usable predictions about stuff. And they’re pretty good at that.

But to figure out what the foundations really are and how they relate to other things in physics—these things are still up in the air. You’ve got to get some of the scientists to think about those things, and you’ve got to get some of the philosophers to think about what the science is. You’ve got to put those two things together. And contemporary philosophy of physics, with an orientation towards metaphysics, has a role to play there.

HB: So if analytic philosophers do metaphysics, how can they distinguish themselves from philosophers as a whole?

SS: They don’t.

HB: Does that categorization have any meaning anymore?

SS: No, it doesn’t. There isn’t some doctrinaire view—there were at earlier stages of analytic philosophy—about what philosophy must be which eliminated whole domains of previous thought. That’s not true anymore.

Most analytic philosophers today think that those restrictive doctrines were themselves the product of doctrines that were flawed, and now they have a considerably more open and almost experimental approach.

The idea is that we’re not separate from other intellectual disciplines. All we demand is that you pursue whatever you’re pursuing with rigour, that you articulate some criteria that can be, at least to some degree, tested—not to necessarily definitively determine who’s correct, but at least provide evidence about who’s correct—and that you can be well understood: you can formulate the theses and generate results that can then be taken to other domains of intellectual life to see if they contribute anything.

HB: That sounds very tolerant and open-minded.

SS: That’s what we are.

HB: So I’m led to believe. But are there any members of your profession who still cling to the old divisions? Are there people who say, “I’m not one of those analytic guys. I’m this or I’m that”? Do those old divisions hold any meaning for people who define themselves in opposition to what analytic philosophers are or do?

SS: That’s a difficult question to answer. When I started my first job at Yale in 1976, the Yale department saw itself as divided between the analytic philosophers—who were in the minority—and the others, who called themselves the pluralists. What it meant to be a pluralist, was to be anything but an analytic philosopher. What it was, in their minds, to be an analytic philosopher was to subscribe to some contemporary version of Carnapian logical positivism.

But by the time I started in 1976, there weren’t any of those people around anymore. But there was still, at that time, a sense that there was some sort of divide, and that people couldn’t talk across the divide.

In 1980, when I moved to Princeton, there wasn’t that sort of feeling, although I should say that it’s a heavily analytic department. Over the two and a half decades that I was there, there were some disputes about the role of the history of philosophy in the pursuit of contemporary philosophy. There were a few members of the department who said, “Look, PhD students in physics, chemistry and biology are not studying the scientists of 300, 200, 100 or, even 50 years ago, so why should we do that in philosophy?”

One particular professor said that he thought the rule ought to be that anything that’s older than ten years in philosophy is the history of philosophy, and that the history of philosophy was not philosophy. We had some historians of philosophy, who were, for the most part, extremely good, disciplined historians who were also philosophically-minded.

There may still be some sense that we don’t understand the relationship between contemporary, systematic philosophy and the history of philosophy very well. In my own specialized area, the philosophy of language, I don’t go back very far historically. I go back to Frege from 1879 or so. I go back to Bertrand Russell, early Russell, and a bit back to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—although I treat that, personally, more as a historical document than something that can contribute deeply to what’s going on today.

But I believe that we can not only find a terrific story of how our contemporary projects got started, but also how ideas that Frege and Russell incompletely developed can be used to solve some of the problems we face today, thereby taking their original project mu...