Dummett on Analytical Philosophy

B. Weiss, B. Weiss

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137400703
• Sujet: Filosofía
• Sous-sujet: Filosofía analítica

Dummett argues that the aim of philosophy is the analysis of thought and that, with Frege, analytical philosophy learned that the route to the analysis of thought is the analysis of language. Here are bold and deep readings of the subject's history and character, which form the topic of this volume.

1

Dummett on the Logical Basis of Metaphysics

A.W. Moore

This essay is an abridged and slightly adapted version of chapter 14 of my book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Moore, 2012).¹ The purpose of these opening remarks, which are not part of the original chapter, is to provide some necessary background from the rest of the book.

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:

Before Descartes, it can hardly be said that any part of philosophy was recognized as being… fundamental to all the rest: the Cartesian revolution consisted in giving this rôle to the theory of knowledge…[which] was accepted as the starting point for more than two centuries.

Frege’s basic achievement lay in the fact that he totally ignored the Cartesian tradition, and was able, posthumously, to impose his different perspective on other philosophers of the [analytical] tradition.

For Frege the first task, in any philosophical enquiry, is the analysis of meanings. (Dummett, 1981a, pp. 666–7)

He later adds:

[Frege] effected a revolution in philosophy as great as the similar revolution previously effected by Descartes… We can, therefore, date a whole epoch in philosophy as beginning with the work of Frege, just as we can do with Descartes. (ibid., p. 669; cf. Dummett, 1993a, p. 5)

Dummett accordingly characterizes analytical philosophy as ‘post-Fregean philosophy’ (Dummett, 1978l, p. 441).

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.

Dummett’s conception of metaphysics and its relation to logic

Dummett holds philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular, to be at root the analysis of thought; and he holds the analysis of thought to be at root the analysis of the means by which thought is expressed, which is to say language. This makes ‘the philosophy of language… the foundation of all other philosophy’ (Dummett, 1978l, p. 442; cf. p. 458).³ As we have just seen, Dummett takes that to be one of the principal lessons to be learned from Frege, and he takes it to be the fundamental tenet of analytical philosophy.⁴

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,

expects philosophers to answer deep questions of great import for an understanding of the world. Do we have free will? Can the soul… exist apart from the body?… Is there a God?⁸ And the layman is quite right: if philosophy does not aim at answering such questions, it is worth nothing. (Dummett, 1991b, p. 1)

The time has therefore come, in Dummett’s view, to overcome the opposition between these two enterprises: to master the unsettling effects of reflection on linguistic sense and to put it to work in tacking those big questions, just as Frege put it to work in tackling fundamental questions in the philosophy of mathematics.

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

•unlike both Wittgenstein and Quine we shall need to take seriously the possibility of a systematic theory of linguistic sense;⁹

•unlike Carnap and other logical positivists we shall need to take seriously the possibility of contributions to the exercise of making sense of things that consist neither in conceptual analysis nor in empirical investigation;¹⁰

•unlike naturalistic philosophers such as Lewis we shall need to pay proper attention not just to sense, still less just to linguistic sense, but to the making of sense;¹¹

and indeed

•unlike naturalistic philosophers more generally we shall need to eschew naturalism.¹²

I said ‘significant departures from many of the great philosophers in the analytical tradition’. Including even Frege? Including even Frege. We shall consider Dummett’s most significant departure from Frege in the next section. But as a foretaste I note that Dummett takes Frege to accord an unreasonable degree of objectivity to linguistic sense.¹³ Dummett thinks that Frege spoils his own insights about the relations between linguistic sense and language itself. He thinks that, by casting linguistic sense as something that is completely independent of language, and indeed of us, Frege thwarts a satisfactory account of how such sense is grasped and conveyed in acts of linguistic communication, and of how our grasp of it furnishes us with knowledge of the Bedeutungen¹⁴ of linguistic expressions. We shall see in the next section how this relates to his fundamental departure from Frege.

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):

The world is the totality of facts, not things, and facts are true [thoughts];¹⁶ so the concept of truth is the hinge upon which the door from the philosophy of thought opens into metaphysics, that is, the range of philosophical problems that concern the general character of reality. (Dummett, 2007g, p. 890)

To reflect on the character of truth will in turn be, in Frege’s famous phrase, ‘to discern the laws of truth’ (Frege, 1997c, p. 325/...