The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy

E. Reck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230201538
• eBook ISBN: 9781137304872
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

During the last 25 years, a large number of publications on the history of analytic philosophy have appeared, significantly more than in the preceding period. As most of these works are by analytically trained authors, it is tempting to speak of a 'historical turn' in analytic philosophy. The present volume constitutes both a contribution to this body of work and a reflection on what is, or might be, achieved in it. The twelve new essays, by an international group of contributors, range from case studies on individual philosophers (Russell, Carnap, Quine, and Ryle) through discussions of broader themes in the history of analytic philosophy (in logic and philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and psychology) to related methodological reflections (on the relationship between doing analytic philosophy and studying the history of philosophy, on various forms of philosophical history, and on their respective benefits).

Part I

Case Studies

1

Philosophy and the Tide of History: Bertrand Russell’s Role in the Rise of Analytic Philosophy

Stewart Candlish

Philosophers are reluctant to take time off to do history, even the history of their own subject. Philosophy is too entrancing.

(Jackson, 2004, p. 652)

1 Introduction

The remarks I have chosen as an epigraph to this chapter encapsulate, neatly though perhaps inadvertently, a striking view of philosophy’s relation to its own history: that writing the history of philosophy involves time off from philosophy itself. Through examination of an intertwined set of examples, an examination which gives us a new perspective on those examples, I shall try to display the indefensibility of this view, and show that lack of attention to our own history leads us into bad philosophy, characterized by complacency and hubris, generating misguided projects, false assumptions, and the overlooking of serious alternatives.

Of course, Jackson’s comments, at least by the breathless standards of the modern academic journal, have themselves begun to slip into the past; but this attitude to the history of philosophy has been common enough, especially amongst analytic philosophers – my own tradition, as it happens – where I have come across the view many times, across a variety of philosophers one might expect to agree on little else; were there received wisdom in analytic philosophy, this might be a component of it. I call it an attitude, rather than, say, a view, because is rarely expressed, especially so publicly and with such brutal frankness as that displayed above, appearing more often, and obliquely, in casual conversation (though sometimes in journal policies, where it eventually provokes a reaction, leading to the setting up of specialist journals such as the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, established in the early 1990s). The attitude is well expressed by a joke attributed to Quine, that there are two sorts of people interested in philosophy, those interested in philosophy and those interested in the history of philosophy. As Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out, the counter-joke is this: ‘[T]he people interested in philosophy now are doomed to become those whom only those interested in the history of philosophy are going to be interested in in a hundred years’ time’, though he added, more sombrely, ‘So the philosophical nullifying of the past by this conception of the relationship between past and present turns out to be a way of nullifying ourselves in advance’ (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 40). All of us will stand at history’s bar, and at some stage, if we are not just ignored, most of our contributions to the professional journals will certainly look quaint, perhaps bizarre, maybe even unintelligible. We shall be dependent on the kindness of strangers to retrieve our issues, and even our meanings. On this view, the historian of philosophy is a kind stranger, one who is interested in what actual philosophers say, and not just as a justification for saying something different; rather, the historian is a model listener, patient and concerned to understand what is said, and why, before assuming the right to reply. Such a listener will not be so rude as to discount a philosophical suggestion because of its proponent’s age. Nor would they be content, for instance, to form their impression of Wittgenstein on the basis of the corrupt texts and occasional outright mistranslations with which early readers had to work, let alone on the variously tendentious secondary (and now extensive and even more tendentious tertiary) literature. Of course, Wittgenstein is a particularly exasperating example: it is hard to think of a philosopher who made a bigger mess of bringing the bulk of his own writings into publishable form. And it is all too possible for the task of understanding to become an end in itself: the sense that another and incomparably greater mind is almost within one’s reach is too entrancing, so that one may forget the point of making contact.

Perhaps the primary point of making contact is, of course, to find out whether this or that philosopher is telling us the truth about something, or is at least saying something we can use. But another – and it is not a rival – is to put our own practice into some kind of perspective, by looking at where we have come from and how we got here. Communities tend to have myths about this sort of thing, and there is no reason to suppose that philosophers are immune. In fact, what is going on in episodes of philosophical development is often below the surface, not to be found in standard histories or textbooks – especially when they are written by those involved. We can divide the subterranean influences into two kinds: the internal, that is, those which arise from philosophy itself, and the external, those which come from the wider society in which the practice of philosophy is embedded. Most of this chapter will concern an example of the internal influences; I shall say a very little about the external ones in the final section.

2 The theory of denoting phrases and Russell’s conception of propositions

If we take MacIntyre’s figure of a hundred years and look back, one of the most prominent sights in the vicinity is Russell’s ‘On Denoting’ of 1905. According to Robert Marsh, the editor of Logic and Knowledge, Russell called this ‘his finest philosophical essay’. It is certainly his most famous and most overtly influential philosophical essay, introducing a theory which Frank Ramsey famously called ‘that paradigm of philosophy’. Even Wittgenstein – notoriously hard on Russell in most other respects – just took over the theory in the Tractatus (1922, section 3.24). In fact, until Strawson attacked it in 1950, hardly anyone uttered a word of criticism. The essay was reprinted time and again even in collections intended for hapless undergraduates. No one seemed to care that its central argument proved baffling even to professionals, with the result that the history of twentieth-century philosophy resembled a map of 1970s Berlin as edited by the Stasi, with darkness at its heart. Few seemed to care that, of the three puzzles Russell announces as solved by the new theory, there is doubt either about the genuineness of the puzzle, or about whether Russell’s solution works, or about whether he even needed a solution since he had already solved some of them in a different way. None of this detracted from the paper’s iconic status as the first published appearance of the Theory of Definite Descriptions. Again, no one seemed to notice the article’s actual title, or to care that Russell clearly thought of it as providing an account of denoting phrases, thus implicitly connecting it with his 1903 (Principles of Mathematics) theory of denoting concepts, a connection which was largely ignored until the 1980s. And few, until recently, have queried the standard – and false – story of the theory’s genesis and purport. (Quine, true to his own joke, was one of the principal sources of this falsehood.) Partly as a result, after Strawson, the Theory of Descriptions provided one of the staples of discussion in the philosophy of language for decades.

And this fact is very odd, because, like that other major influence on the philosophy of language, Frege, Russell was not especially concerned with language, and for very many years, including the period of ‘On Denoting’, his conception of propositions was decidedly non-linguistic; and that conception (along with his obsessive attempts to resolve the paradoxes which threatened the foundations of mathematics) did far more than the Theory of Descriptions to motivate the major changes in Russell’s metaphysical views over the next few years.

This comes out most dramatically in Russell’s correspondence with Frege. Frege, arguing that ‘the word “true” is not a predicate like “green”’, had said in a letter of November 1904, ‘Truth is not a component part of a thought, just as Mont Blanc with its snowfields is not itself a component part of the thought that Mont Blanc is more than 4000 metres high’. Russell ignored the point about truth and took up the example to attack Frege’s Sinn/Bedeutung distinction, saying,

I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition [Satz] ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4000 metres high’. We do not assert the thought [Gedanke], for this is a private psychological matter: we assert the object of the thought, and this is, to my mind, a certain complex (an objective proposition, one might say) in which Mont Blanc is itself a component part. If we do not admit this, then we get the conclusion that we know nothing at all about Mont Blanc [itself]. (Russell, 1904b, p. 169)

Ignore the cross-purposes about thoughts. The crucial claim in this passage is the last one. It is one of those Russellian ideas which appear only infrequently, but are nevertheless a constant presence, shaping the direction of the reasoning. The idea helps explain the occurrence of some of the odder features in the early sections of the 1903 Principles of Mathematics. And – given that Russell’s primary interest was in propositions rather than mountains – it makes it unmistakably clear that the motivation behind his peculiar account of the nature of the proposition is epistemological. No doubt, he is imposing a subjectivist and idealist interpretation on Frege which Frege himself would surely have rejected. Still, justified or not, his worry seems to be that if our propositions consist of senses rather than of the actual things we are talking about, then there will be an impenetrable barrier to knowledge of those things.

We can discern the same train of thought at work several years later:

But in this view [that ‘judgments consist of ideas’] ideas become a veil between us and outside things – we never really, in knowledge, attain to the things we are supposed to be knowing about, but only to the ideas of those things. (Russell, 1911, p. 155)

This part of Russell’s reaction against idealism, evident as early as 1903, is to insist that the very objects about which we speak actually compose our thoughts. In these earlier years, moreover (that is, prior to the formulation of the multiple relation theory of judgment), years which include the appearance of ‘On Denoting’, the existence of a proposition does not depend on anyone’s formulating it – they are all out there waiting for us.

This extreme reaction is difficult enough to sustain. But Russell made it harder for himself by combining it with an extreme atomism, claiming that every such object is in a sense complete; in The Principles of Mathematics, he argues that Frege’s notion of a kind of incomplete thing, namely a concept, which cannot be made a logical subject, is self-contradictory [1903, section 49]. In contrast, he considered the constituents of judgments to be entities in their own right: not aspects of a prior whole, but real parts each capable of figuring as a logical subject. For example, each of the three words expressing the judgment that Goebbels admired Hitler serves to introduce a separate element of reality with equal ontological status, namely, the man Goebbels, the universal relation of admiration, and the man Hitler. Russell’s monist (and usually idealist) predecessors had thought that a judgment is a bit like something carved from a single piece of wood: the fact that we can treat it as having parts does not show that it was assembled from such parts; these components are notional rather than real. For Russell, on the other hand, a judgment is like a model assembled from pieces existing in their own right, all of which are, in Frege’s terms, ‘saturated’. There is just one fundamental ontological category, the term:

Whatever may be an object of thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one, I call a term. ... [E]very term has being, i.e. is in some sense. A man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimaera, or anything else that can be mentioned, is sure to be a term; and to deny that such and such a thing is a term must always be false. ... A term is, in fact, possessed of all the properties commonly assigned to substances or substantives. (Russell, 1903, section 47)

He noticed one of the difficulties posed by this view immediately:

Consider, for example, the proposition “A differs from B.” The constituents of this proposition, if we analyze it, appear to be only A, difference, B. Yet these constituents, thus placed side by side, do not reconstitute the proposition. The difference which occurs in the proposition actually relates A and B, whereas the difference after analysis is a notion which has no connection with A and B. ... A proposition, in fact, is essentially a unity, and when analysis has destroyed the unity, no enumeration of constituents will restore the proposition. The verb, when used as a verb, embodies the unity of the proposition, and is thus distinguishable from the verb considered as a term, though I do not know how to give a clear account of the precise nature of the distinction. (ibid., section 54)

Russell’s problem, then, is that while he cannot deny propositional unity, he can find no account of the proposition which can do justice to it. In his ontology, there is no room for a propositional unifier; to continue with our analogy, it is as though he expects one special component of the kit to hold all the rest together, while no component is endowed with the capacity to do so. To change the analogy to one more familiar: it is as if Russell expects to be able to form a chain from a collection of rings by adding one master ring to bind them. But he is in the dark about how this can be done.

No doubt keen to get on with mathematical business, which is where, as he must already have known, his significant achievements were to come, he left the matter unresolved in 1903. Opinions differ over how serious this so-called problem of the unity of the proposition is: certainly a number of philosophers in recent years have argued that it was fatal to Russell’s ideas (at least, his ideas over the period 1903–1918); others have thought it just a muddle; others again have suggested that the problem is one not peculiar to Russell and have proposed solutions, while still others, unconcerned with history but whose views are close enough to Russell’s for it to seem a potential threat, have apparently overlooked it altogether, so busy have they been reinventing the square wheel. Anyway, whether or not we think that propositions consist of independent bits, a related difficulty is certainly serious. Let us see how it arises. Propositional unity seemed to Russell an undeniable datum: a proposition is a unity, and hence on his views an entity. At this stage of his thinking, propositions are objects of belief (or judgment as he called it then). That is, judgment is a dyadic relation between a mind and a proposition. But Russe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Analytic Philosophy and Philosophical History
• Part I  Case Studies
• Part II  Broader Themes
• Part III  Methodological Reflections
• Index