Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

348

private mental events cannot be intelligibly stated, because to do so would be

to suppose that one can publically say something about what the doctrine itself

says cannot be mentioned in a language accessible to more than one person.

The fact that Wittgenstein’s argument against private language depends

essentially on the question, “What is it to follow a rule?” illustrates a common

characteristic of his writings, viz., that themes developed in one area of

philosophy continually emerge in apparently quite divorced areas. His

extraordinary ability to see a common source of difficulty in philosophical

problems that seem to be unrelated helps to explain his style of writing, which

seems at first sight to be a somewhat chaotic arrangement of ideas.

Analytic philosophy has also been attracted to a behavioristic view of

mental phenomena that holds that such apparently private events as the feeling

of fear are not only not really private but also that they can be identified with

publicly observable patterns of behavior. The disposition toward empirical

science, with observation as its foundation, united with the observation that

the evidence men have of what goes on in the mental lives of other people

must come from what they see of their behavior, has often warred against the

other inclination of Empiricism to regard the starting point of all knowledge of

the world, for each person, as being essentially private sense experience.

Wittgenstein has had tremendous influence, however, in suggesting that these

two extremes are not the only alternatives. Yet attempts to state how

Wittgenstein could deny the privacy of experience without espousing some

form of behaviorism have not been very successful. Sympathetic interpreters

have taken up the notion of “criteria,” used, but not developed in any detail,

by Wittgenstein. For mental states such as fear, outward behavior (e.g.,

running away, blanching, or cringing) does not constitute what it is to be in

that state, as behaviorism would have it, but neither is it merely evidence of

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some completely private event. The problem has been to characterize the

relation between behavior and mental states so that the two are neither

identical nor evidence one for the other, while still acknowledging that a

knowledge of the person’s characteristic behavior is essential to understanding

the notion of a certain mental state.

Recent Trends in England

Those philosophers who might fairly be labelled “Wittgensteinians,”

who follow the methods that Wittgenstein employed in his later period, should

be distinguished from those who have been influenced more indirectly by the

general trends and philosophical atmosphere that arose in large part from

Wittgenstein’s work.

Wittgensteinians

Close students of his ideas have tended to work chiefly on particular

concepts that lie at the core of traditional philosophical problems. As an

example of such an investigation, a monograph entitled Intention (1957), by

G.E.M. Anscombe, an editor of Wittgenstein’s posthumous works, may be

cited as an extended study of what it is for a person to intend to do something,

and of what the relationship is between his intention and the actions that he

performs. This work has occupied a central place in a growing literature about

human actions, which in turn has influenced views about the nature of

psychology, of the social sciences, and of ethics. And, as an extension of this

British influence into the United States, one of Wittgenstein’s students,

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Norman Malcolm of Cornell University, has investigated such concepts as

knowledge, certainty, memory, and dreaming. As these topics suggest,

Wittgensteinians have tended to concentrate on Wittgenstein’s ideas about the

nature of mental concepts and to work in the area of philosophical

psychology. Typically, they begin with classical philosophical theories and

attack them by arguing that they employ some key concept, such as that of

knowledge, in a manner incongruous with the way in which the concept

would actually be employed in various situations. Their works thus abound

with descriptions of hypothetical, though usually homely, situations and with

questions of the form, “What would a person say if…?” or “Would one call

this a case of X ?” In doing so, they are following out Wittgenstein’s advice

that, instead of trying to capture the essence of a concept by an abstract

analysis, the philosopher should look at how it is employed in a variety of

situations.

Oxford Philosophers

After World War II, Oxford University was the center of extraordinary

philosophical activity; and, although Wittgenstein’s general outlook on

philosophy – his turning away, for example, from the notion of formal

methods in philosophical analysis – was an important ingredient, many of the

Oxford philosophers could not be called Wittgensteinians in the strict sense.

The method employed by many of these philosophers has often been

characterized – especially by critics – as an “appeal to ordinary language,”

and they were thus identified as belonging to the school of “ordinary

language” philosophy. Exactly what this form of argument is supposed to be

and what exemplifies it in the writings of these philosophers has been by no

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means clear. Gilbert Ryle, Moore’s successor as editor of a leading journal,

Mind – and especially in his The Concept of Mind – was among the most

prominent of those analysts who were regarded as using ordinary language as

a philosophical tool. Ryle, like Wittgenstein, pointed out the mistake of

regarding the mind as what he called “a ghost in a machine” – to defeat the

radical dualism of mind and body that has characterized much of

philosophical thinking – by investigating how people employ a variety of

concepts, such as memory, perception, and imagination, that designate

“mental” properties. He tried to show that, when philosophers carry out such

investigations, they find that, roughly speaking, it is the way people act and

behave that leads to attributing these properties to them, and that there is no

involvement of anything internally private. He also attempted to show how

philosophers have come to dualistic conclusions – usually from having a

wrong model in terms of which to interpret human activities. A dualistic

model may be constructed, for example, by wrongly supposing that an

intelligently behaving person must be continually utilizing knowledge of facts

– knowledge that something is the case. Ryle contended, on the contrary, that

much intelligent behavior is a matter of knowing how to do something and

that, once this fact is acknowledged, there is no temptation to explain the

behavior by looking for a private internal knowledge of facts. Though Ryle’s

objectives were similar to those of Wittgenstein, his results have often seemed

more behavioristic than Wittgenstein’s.

It is true that Ryle did ask, in pursuit of his method, some fairly detailed

questions about when a person would say, for example, that someone had

been imagining something; but it is by no means clear that he was appealing

to ordinary language in the sense that his was an investigation into how, say,

speakers of English use certain expressions. In any case, the charge, often

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voiced by critics, that this style of philosophizing trivializes and perverts

philosophy from its traditional function would probably also have to be

levelled against Aristotle, who frequently appealed to “what we would say.”

A powerful philosophical figure among postwar Oxford philosophers

was John Austin, who was White’s professor of moral philosophy until his

death, in 1960. Austin felt that many philosophical theories derive their

plausibility from overlooking distinctions – often very fine – between

different uses of expressions, and he also thought that philosophers too

frequently think that any one of a number of expressions will do just as well

for their purposes. (Thus, ignoring the difference between an illusion and a

delusion, for example, gives credence to the view that what one immediately

perceives are not physical objects, but sense data.) Austin’s work was, in

many respects, much closer to the ideal of philosophy as comprising the

analysis of concepts than was that of Ryle or Wittgenstein. He was also much

more concerned with the nature of language itself and with general theories of

how it functions. This novel approach, as exemplified in How to Do Things

with Words (1962), set a trend that has been followed out in a growing

literature in the philosophy of language. Austin took the total speech act as the

starting point of analysis, which allowed him to make distinctions based not

only upon words and their place in a language but also upon such points as the

speaker’s intentions in making the utterance and its expected effect on the

audience. There was also in Austin’s approach something of the program of

Russell and the early Wittgenstein for laying bare the fundamental structure of

language.

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Recent Trends in the United States

Although the Oxford philosophers and the posthumous publication of

Wittgenstein’s writings have produced a revolution in Anglo-American

philosophy, the branch of Analytic philosophy that emphasized formal

analyses by means of modern logic has by no means been dormant. Since the

appearance of Principia Mathematica, striking new findings have emerged in

logic, many of which, though requiring for their understanding a high level of

mathematical sophistication, are nevertheless important for philosophy.

Among those philosophers for whom symbolic logic occupies a central

position, W.V.O. Quine, Pierce professor of philosophy at Harvard

University, has been especially important. Symbolic logic represented for him,

as it did for many earlier Analytic philosophers, the framework for the

language of science. There were two important themes in his work, however,

that represent significant departures from, say, the positions of the logical

atomists and the Logical Positivists. In the first place, Quine rejected the

distinction between those statements in which their truth or falsity depends

upon the meaning of the terms involved and those in which their truth or

falsity is a matter of empirical and observable fact – a distinction that had

played an essential role in Logical Positivism and was thought by most

Empiricists to be the basis for a division between the deductive and the

empirical sciences. Quine, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) and

subsequent writings, argued that the sort of distinction intended by

philosophers is impossible to draw. In the course of his argument, a similar

doubt was cast upon concepts traditional not only to philosophy but also to

linguistics – in particular, the concept of synonymy or sameness of meaning.

Quine’s attack has been a threat not only to some long-held doctrines of the

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Analytic tradition but also to its conception of the nature of philosophy, which

has generally depended upon contrasting it with the empirical sciences.

The second important departure of Quine’s philosophy has been his

attempt to show that science can be successfully conducted without what he

calls “intentional entities.” In contrast to “extensional,” used above as an

essential feature of standard symbolic logic, intentional entities include many

of the common items that Analytic philosophers often assume that they can

talk about without difficulty, such as the meanings of expressions,

propositions, or the property of certain statements (such as those of

mathematics) of being necessarily true. Quine’s program – as exemplified by

Word and Object (1960) – is intended in part to show that science can say

everything that it needs to say without using concepts that cannot be expressed

in the extensional language of standard logic. Quine’s work, though by no

means widely accepted, has made Analytic philosophers at least wary of

uncritically accepting certain of their standard distinctions.

Since the mid-20th century, there has been an interaction between the

science of linguistics and Analytic philosophy. This did not occur before

because Analytic philosophers had almost always considered their study of

language to be a priori and unconcerned with empirical facts about particular

languages. Recently, however, a book by Noam Chomsky, a U.S. generative

grammarian, entitled Syntactic Structures (1957), has produced a theory of

grammar that not only has profoundly affected the course of linguistics but

also bears striking resemblances to philosophical analysis. At first, some

Analytic philosophers saw in Chomsky’s theory a technique that could be

applied to philosophy. It was subsequently considered, however, that, whereas

the possibility of looking at grammar in Chomsky’s way had contributed

valuable concepts for philosophers, the possibility that it would become a

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methodology for Analytic philosophy had receded. The interchange between

linguists and philosophers, however, has continued.

Analytic Philosophy Today

It is not possible to forecast in any detail the future trends of Analytic

philosophy in Anglo-American and Scandinavian countries. It seems

relatively certain, however, that the two conceptions of the subject that stem

from Moore and Russell will both continue.

Analytic philosophers, mainly influenced by Oxford philosophy, and

those for whom symbolic logic is a touchstone analyze many of the same

problems and benefit from each other’s work. Analysis in the more rigorous

sense that Russell’s theory of definite descriptions represents is more

frequently an aim, despite the doubts of Wittgenstein and many of the Oxford

philosophers. The general idea that the only ultimate explanations of the world

are the scientific ones and the usual corollary that philosophy is in the service

of science – which was a central idea for Russell, for the Logical Positivists,

and (in recent times) for Quine – has apparently lost nothing of its vigour. The

opposing tendencies, noted above, among Empiricists in general, and present

also in Analytic philosophy, toward behaviorism or Materialism, on the one

hand, and toward an Idealism of a phenomenalistic sort (such as that of the

Irish bishop George Berkeley), on the other, are not present in the same form

– mainly because of the sustained criticisms of Wittgenstein, of his followers,

and of the Oxford philosophers. The battleground has shifted to a more subtle

level. A substantial number of Analytic philosophers who are styled

Materialists or physicalists have proposed a novel technique for reducing

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mental events and states to physical states. They avoid the well-exposed

difficulties of older attempts in which it was held that, when one apparently

talks about a separate realm of the mind – speaking of such things as thoughts,

emotions, and sensations – the proper analysis of its meaning would be in

terms of physical properties and events (usually observable behavior). The

novel idea, on the contrary, is that there is, in fact, an identity between so-

called mental events and certain physical events, particularly those occurring

in the brain, an identity that it is eventually the task of science to specify – in a

way modelled after that in which science discovered that lightning is identical

with an electrical discharge. The opposition against this new brand of

scientific Materialism does not set up against it a view of the mind as a

separate realm coexisting with the physical nor as an essentially private

collection of nonphysical events and objects. Rather, the issue has been joined

on the question whether the language (or perhaps the concepts) of the

psychological and the physical are such as to allow for a scientifically

discovered identity between items of the one and items of the other. That there

still remains a division among Analytic philosophers concerning the problem

of the mental and the physical (though in much altered form) shows both the

continuity of the movement and the changes that have occurred.

Empiricism

In its most general sense, Empiricism is the name applied to the attitude

that beliefs are to be accepted and acted upon only if they first have been

confirmed by actual experience – a definition that accords with the derivation

of the name from the Greek word empeiria, “experience.”

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More specifically, Empiricism comprises a pair of closely related, but

still distinct, philosophical doctrines – one pertaining to concepts and the other

to propositions:

1. The first of these doctrines, a theory of meaning, holds that words

(e.g., the word substance) can be understood or the concepts requisite for any

articulate thought possessed only if they are connected by their users with

things that they have experienced or could experience (e.g., pieces of wood, or

the gases in a gasoline engine).

2. The second doctrine, a philosophical theory of knowledge, views

beliefs, or at least some vital classes of beliefs (e.g., that Jane is kind), as

depending ultimately and necessarily on experience for justification (Jane is

seen performing acts of kindness).

It is not obvious, however, that either of these two doctrines strictly

implies the other. Several recognized Empiricists have admitted that there are

a priori propositions but have denied that there are a priori concepts. The

reverse disconnection between the two forms of Empiricism, however, has no

obvious exponents, since there are hardly any philosophers who totally deny a

priori propositions and certainly none who would at the same time accept a

priori concepts.

Stressing experience, Empiricism is thus opposed to the claims of

authority, intuition, imaginative conjecture, and abstract, theoretical, or

systematic reasoning as sources of reliable belief. Its most fundamental

antithesis is with the latter (i.e., with Rationalism, also called intellectualism

or apriorism). A Rationalist theory of meaning asserts that there are concepts

not derived from or correlated with experienceable features of the world, such