My book is concerned with the history of metaphysics since Descartes. The definition of metaphysics on which it is based is ‘the most general attempt to make sense of things’. (See ibid., Intro., §§1–5, for elucidation and defence of this definition.) The book charts the evolution of this enterprise through various competing conceptions of its possibility, scope, and limits. Chapter 14 is the final chapter of Part II, which deals with the analytical tradition.

The first chapter of Part II, playing prologue to chapter 14’s epilogue, is on Frege. In that chapter I raise the question of what the analytical tradition is and what Frege’s relation to it is. While conceding that there is no consensus concerning how to characterize the analytical tradition, I insist that Frege cannot fail to count as a supremely important contributor both to its inception and to its propagation. This is because one of the principal aims of the analytical tradition is undoubtedly clarity of understanding and one of the principal means whereby it pursues this aim is undoubtedly the analysis of language; and contemporary formal logic, which Frege founded, provides the single most powerful set of tools that analytical philosophers use in undertaking such analysis. But not only that; Frege also demonstrated how this kind of close attention to language could play a crucial rôle in addressing philosophical problems.

Dummett, whose contribution to the exposition and dissemination of Frege’s work is of course unrivalled,² features prominently in that chapter on Frege. He does so principally in connection with this last point. For he famously takes Frege’s achievement to have been, in a very particular way, even greater than I have claimed. He thinks that Frege demonstrated, not just how close attention to language could play a crucial rôle in addressing philosophical problems, but how it could play a foundational rôle in doing so. On Dummett’s view, Frege was the main instigator of what has come to be known as the linguistic turn in philosophy and analytical philosophy is the result of that turn. Dummett characterizes the revolution that he sees Frege as having effected in the following terms:

It is Dummett’s enormous admiration of Frege, evidenced in these quotations, that provides the most significant immediate context for what follows. Dummett, in his work on metaphysics as elsewhere, wants to direct our attention back to Frege. He is convinced that we need to reassimilate the insights that were integral to Frege’s revolution before there can be any serious prospect of progress in metaphysics. In the opening paragraph of chapter 14 of my book I advert to this fact. The chapter then proceeds as follows.

Let us reflect on how this tenet relates specifically to metaphysics. In Dummett’s view, metaphysical questions are questions about the most general character of reality. They are questions about what, in general, it takes for things to be the way they are.⁵ That is, they are questions about what, in general, it takes for things to be the way we think they are, when what we think is true. For Dummett, then, the most general attempt to make sense of things is an attempt to make sense of the sense, in general, that we make of things, in so far as we make correct sense of them. But there is no access to that sense save through the means by which we express it, namely language: such is the lesson of Frege. So the most general attempt to make sense of things is an attempt to make sense of linguistic sense, where this embraces all our thought and all that constitutes our thought.

Very well; but how well has analytical philosophy born witness to Dummett’s conception of these matters? Certainly Frege’s own attention to linguistic sense has had an indelible impact on subsequent analytical philosophy. Nevertheless, little of what has happened since in the analytical tradition has exhibited the smooth application of Frege’s ideas to the addressing of traditional metaphysical questions which Dummett’s conception suggests it could and should have done. On the contrary, attempts to make sense of linguistic sense, on the one hand, and attempts to make linguistic sense in response to traditional metaphysical questions, on the other, have tended to militate against each other, with now the former prevailing, now the latter.⁶

This was certainly true in the case of Wittgenstein, both early and late. Here it was the former that prevailed. The making of linguistic sense was perceived as an activity to be protected, and to be protected, moreover, against attempts to address traditional metaphysical questions. Traditional metaphysical questions were perceived as nothing but morasses of confusion, wrecking the making of linguistic sense and nourishing the production of nonsense. The same was true in the case of the logical positivists. There too the former prevailed. In Quine, his positivist pedigree notwithstanding, there was a shift in favour of the latter. Quine showed a readiness to reengage with traditional metaphysical questions, but only as facilitated by an unreadiness to reflect on linguistic sense, which, at least in its Fregean guise, he went as far as repudiating. Similarly in the case of subsequent naturalistic philosophers. Here the unreadiness, which has often been as much a lack of due equipment as a lack of due willing, has been an unreadiness to reflect on sense-making more generally, so that it has become virtually impossible for these philosophers to see how the metaphysical questions that they are addressing connect with broader humanistic concerns; how they manage to be the big questions that they have always affected to be.⁷

Dummett finds all of this intolerable. ‘The layman’, he writes,

This will entail significant departures from many of the great philosophers in the analytical tradition. Thus:

The programme, then, is first to clear the way for a systematic theory of linguistic sense by reflecting on what such a theory must look like,¹⁵ and then, in the light of this reflection, to address the metaphysical questions that analytical philosophers hitherto have tended either to shun or to tackle with inadequate tools. A crucial part of the programme will be to reflect on the character of truth. This is not just because the concept of linguistic sense and the concept of truth are correlative and need to be explained together (see e.g. Dummett, 2004, p. 107; Dummett, 2007e, pp. 372–3). It is also because, as indicated earlier, the connection between making maximally general sense of things and making sense of making linguistic sense is forged by reflecting on the contents of true thoughts. Here is how Dummett himself puts the matter, quoting the famous second sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1961, 1.1):