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Analytic Philosophy in America

• Scott Soames

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Analytic Philosophy in America: And Other Historical and Contemporary Essays

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In this collection of recent and unpublished essays, leading analytic philosopher Scott Soames traces milestones in his field from its beginnings in Britain and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, through its subsequent growth in the United States, up to its present as the world’s most vigorous philosophical tradition. The central essay chronicles how analytic philosophy developed in the United States out of American pragmatism, the impact of European visitors and immigrants, the midcentury transformation of the Harvard philosophy department, and the rapid spread of the analytic approach that followed. Another essay explains the methodology guiding analytic philosophy, from the logicism of Frege and Russell through Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn and Carnap’s vision of replacing metaphysics with philosophy of science. Further essays review advances in logic and the philosophy of mathematics that laid the foundation for a rigorous, scientific study of language, meaning, and information. Other essays discuss W.V.O. Quine, David K. Lewis, Saul Kripke, the Frege-Russell analysis of quantification, Russell’s attempt to eliminate sets with his “no class theory,” and the Quine-Carnap dispute over meaning and ontology. The collection then turns to topics at the frontier of philosophy of language. The final essays, combining philosophy of language and law, advance a sophisticated originalist theory of interpretation and apply it to U.S. constitutional rulings about due process.

"[T]he book offers a good overview of the most important problems and controversies of analytic philosophy, especially those related to philosophy of language. One will also appreciate the author's constant effort to propose critical remarks and to consider contemporary debates. . . . Soames . . . provides us with a stimulating volume for those generally interested by the history and actuality of the analytic tradition."—Alexandre Declos, Metapsychology Online Reviews

"This is a very good collection of philosophical essays—probably as good as any currently being published anywhere by anyone."—Gilbert Harman, Princeton University

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The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

“Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are doctors,” have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings. They are contrasted with more usual “synthetic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are rich,” (knowledge of) whose truth depends also upon (knowledge of) the worldly fortunes of pediatricians. Beginning with Frege, many philosophers hoped to show that the truths of logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori domains, such as much of philosophy and the foundations of science, could be shown to be analytic by careful “conceptual analysis” of the meanings of crucial words. Analyses of philosophically important terms and concepts, such as “material object,” “cause,” “freedom,” or “knowledge” turned out, however, to be far more problematic than philosophers had anticipated, and some, particularly Quine and his followers, began to doubt the reality of the distinction. This in turn led him and others to doubt the factual determinacy of claims of meaning and translation in general, as well as, ultimately, the reality and determinacy of mental states. There have been a number of interesting reactions to this scepticism, in philosophy and linguistics (this latter to be treated in the supplement, Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics ); but, while the reality of mental states might be saved, it has yet to be shown that appeals to the analytic will ever be able to ground “analysis” and the a priori in quite the way that philosophers had hoped. (Note that all footnotes are substantive, but inessential to an initial reading, and are accessed in a separate file by clicking on the bracketed superscript. The mention vs. use of a term will be indicated either by quotation marks or italics, depending upon which is most easily readable in the context.)

2.1 Mathematics

2.2 science and beyond, 3.1 the paradox of analysis, 3.2 problems with logicism, 3.3 convention.

• 3.4 Verificationism and Confirmation Holism

3.5 Quine on Meaning in Linguistics

3.6.1 centrality, 3.6.2 one criterion concepts.

• 3.6.3 The World, Not Words

4.1 Neo-Cartesianism

4.2 externalist theories of meaning, 4.3 internal dependencies.

• 4.4 A Chomskyan Strategy

5. Conclusion

• Supplement: Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics

Other Internet Resources

Related entries, 1. the intuitive distinction.

Compare the following two sets of sentences:

Most competent English speakers who know the meanings of all the constituent words would find an obvious difference between the two sets: whereas they might wonder about the truth or falsity of those of set I, they would find themselves pretty quickly incapable of doubting those of II. Unlike the former, these latter seem to be justifiable automatically, “just by knowing what the words mean,” as many might spontaneously put it. Indeed, denials of any of them, e.g.,

would seem to be in some important way unintelligible , very like contradictions in terms (the “#” indicates semantic anomaly). Philosophers standardly refer to sentences of the first set as “synthetic,” those of the second as (at least apparently) “analytic.” (Members of set III. are sometimes said to be “analytically false,” although this term is rarely used, and “analytic” is standardly confined to sentences that are regarded as true.) We might call sentences such as (5)-(10) part of the “analytic data” to which philosophers and linguists have often appealed in invoking the distinction (without prejudice, however, to whether such data might otherwise be explained). Some philosophers might want to include in set III. what are called category mistakes (q.v.) such as # The number three likes Tabasco sauce , or # Saturday is in bed (cf., Ryle, 1949 [2009]), but these have figured less prominently in recent discussions, being treated not as semantically anomalous, but as simply false and silly (Quine 1960 [2013, p. 210]).

Many philosophers have hoped that the apparent necessity and a priori status of the claims of logic, mathematics and much of philosophy could be explained by their claims being analytic, our understanding of the meaning of the claims explaining why they seemed to be true “in all possible worlds,” and knowable to be so, “independently of experience.” This view led many of them to regard philosophy as consisting in large part in the “analysis” of the meanings of the relevant claims, words and concepts; [ 1 ] i.e., a provision of conditions that were individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the application of a word or concept, in the way that, for example, being a female and being a parent are each necessary and together sufficient for being a mother . Such a conception seemed to invite and support (although we’ll see it doesn’t entail) the special methodology of “armchair reflection” on concepts in which many philosophers traditionally engaged, independently of any empirical research.

Although there are precursors of the contemporary notion of the analytic in Leibniz, and in Locke and Hume in their talk of “relations of ideas,” the conception that currently concerns many philosophers has its roots in the work of Kant (1787 [1998]) who, at the beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason , wrote:

In all judgments in which the relation of a subject to the predicate is thought (if I only consider affirmative judgments, since the application to negative ones is easy) this relation is possible in two different ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A as something that is (covertly) contained in this concept A; or B lies entirely outside the concept A, though to be sure it stands in connection with it. In the first case, I call the judgment analytic, in the second synthetic. (1787 [1998], B10)

He provided as an example of an analytic judgment, “All bodies are extended”: in thinking of a body we can’t help but also think of it being extended in space; that would seem to be just part of what is meant by “body.” He contrasted this with “All bodies are heavy,” where the predicate (“is heavy”) “is something entirely different from that which I think in the mere concept of body in general” (B11), and we must put together, or “synthesize,” the different concepts, body and heavy (sometimes such concepts are called “ampliative,” “amplifying” a concept beyond what is “contained” in it).

Kant tried to spell out his “containment” metaphor for the analytic in two ways. To see that any of set II is true, he wrote, “I need only to analyze the concept, i.e., become conscious of the manifold that I always think in it, in order to encounter this predicate therein” (B10). But then, picking up a suggestion of Leibniz, he went on to claim:

I merely draw out the predicate in accordance with the principle of contradiction, and can thereby at the same time become conscious of the necessity of the judgment. (B11)

As Jerrold Katz (1988) emphasized, this second definition is significantly different from the “containment” idea, since now, in its appeal to the powerful method of proof by contradiction, the analytic would include all of the (potentially infinite) deductive consequences of a particular claim, many of which could not be plausibly regarded as “contained” in the concept expressed in the claim. For starters, Bachelors are unmarried or the moon is blue is a logical consequence of Bachelors are unmarried —its denial contradicts the latter (a denial of a disjunction is a denial of each disjunct)—but clearly nothing about the color of the moon is remotely “contained in” the concept bachelor . To avoid such consequences, Katz (e.g., 1972, 1988) went on to try to develop a serious theory based upon only the initial containment idea, as, along different lines, does Paul Pietroski (2005, 2018).

One reason Kant may not have noticed the differences between his different characterizations of the analytic was that his conception of “logic” seems to have been confined to Aristotelian syllogistic, and so didn’t include the full resources of modern logic, where, as we’ll see, the differences between the two characterizations become more glaring (see MacFarlane 2002). Indeed, Kant demarcates the category of the analytic chiefly in order to contrast it with what he regards as the more important category of the “synthetic,” which he famously thinks is not confined, as one might initially suppose, merely to the empirical. [ 2 ] He argues that even so elementary an example in arithmetic as 7+5=12 is synthetic, since the concept of 12 is not contained in the concepts of 7 , 5 , or + ,: appreciating the truth of the proposition would seem to require some kind of active “synthesis” by the mind uniting the different constituent thoughts (1787 [1998], B15). And so we arrive at the category of the “synthetic a priori ,” whose very possibility became a major concern of his work. Kant tried to show that the activity of synthesis was the source of the important cases of a priori knowledge, not only in arithmetic, but also in geometry, the foundations of physics, ethics, and philosophy generally, a controversial view that set the stage for much of the philosophical discussions of the subsequent centuries (see Coffa 1991, pt. I).

Apart from geometry, Kant, himself, actually didn’t focus much on the case of mathematics. But, as mathematics in the 19th C. began reaching new heights of sophistication, worries were increasingly raised about its foundations. It was specifically in response to these latter worries that Gottlob Frege (1884 [1980]) tried to improve upon Kant’s formulations of the analytic, and presented what is widely regarded as the next significant discussion of the topic. [ 3 ]

Frege (1884 [1980], §§5,88) and others noted a number of problems with Kant’s “containment” metaphor. In the first place, as Kant (1787 [1998], B756) himself would surely have agreed, the criterion would need to be freed of “psychologistic” suggestions, or claims about merely the accidental thought processes of thinkers, as opposed to claims about truth and justification that are presumably at issue with the analytic. In particular, mere associations are not always matters of meaning: many people in thinking about Columbus may automatically think “the discoverer of America,” or in thinking about the number 7 they “can’t help but also think” about the numeral that denotes it, but it’s certainly not analytic that Columbus discovered America, or that a number is identical with a numeral. Moreover, while it may be arguably analytic that a circle is a closed figure of constant curvature (see Katz, 1972), someone could fail to notice this and so think the one without the other.

Even were Kant to have solved this problem, it isn’t clear how his notion of “containment” would cover cases that seem to be as “analytic” as any of set II, such as:

The transitivity of ancestor or the symmetry of married are not obviously “contained in” the corresponding thoughts in the way that the idea of extension is plausibly “contained in” the notion of body , or male in the notion of bachelor . (13) has seemed particularly troublesome: what else besides colored could be included in the analysis? The concept red involves color – and what else? It is hard to see what else to “add” – except red itself!

Frege attempted to remedy the situation by completely rethinking the foundations of logic, developing what we now think of as modern symbolic logic. He defined a perfectly precise “formal” language, i.e., a language characterized by the “form” – standardly, the shape—of its expressions, and he carefully set out an account of the syntax and semantics of what are called the “logical constants,” such as “and,” “or,” “not,” “all” and “some,” showing how to capture a very wide class of valid inferences containing them. Saying precisely how the constants are determined is a matter of controversy (see Logical Constants ), but, at least roughly and intuitively, they can be thought of as those parts of language that don’t “point” or “function referentially,” aiming to refer to something in the world, in the way that ordinary nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions seem to do. “Socrates” refers to Socrates, “dogs” to dogs, “(is) clever” to cleverness and/or clever things, but words like “or” and “all” don’t seem to function referentially at all. At any rate, it certainly isn’t clear that there are any ors and alls in the world, along with Socrates, the dogs, and sets or properties of them.

This distinction between non-logical, “referring” expressions and logical constants allows us to define a logical truth in a way that has become common (and will be particularly useful in this entry) as a sentence that is true no matter what non-logical expressions occur in it (cf. Tarski, 1936 [1983], Quine, 1956 [1976], Davidson 1980). Consequently (placing non-logical expressions in bold, and re-numbering prior examples):

counts as a (strict) logical truth: no matter what grammatical expressions we put in for the non-logical terms “doctor”, “specialize on” and “children” in (14), the sentence will remain true. For example, substituting “cats” for “doctors”, “chase” for “specialize on” and “mice” for “children,” we get:

(Throughout this discussion, by “substitution” we shall mean uniform substitution of one presumably univocal expression for another in all its occurrences in a sentence.) But what about the others of set II? Substituting “cats” for “doctors” and “mice” for “pediatricians” in

which is obviously false, as would many such substitutions render the rest of the examples of II. (14) and (15) are patent logical truths; their truth depends only upon the semantic values of their logical particles. But All pediatricians are doctors and the other examples, (6)–(8) and (11)–(13), are not formal logical truths, specifiable by the logical form of the sentence (or its pattern of logical particles) alone; nor are their denials, e.g., (9) and (10), formal contradictions (i.e., of the form , where ‘ p ’ stands in for any sentence: “ p and it is not the case that p ”). How are we to capture them?

Here Frege appealed to the notion of “definition,” or —presuming that definitions preserve “meaning”— “synonymy”: the non-logical analytic truths are those that can be converted to formal logical truths by substitution of definitions for defined terms, or synonyms for synonyms. Since “mice” is not synonymous with “pediatrician,” (17) is not a substitution into (16) of the required sort. We need, instead, a substitution of the definition of “pediatrician,” i.e., “doctor that specializes on children,” which would convert (16) into our earlier purely formal logical truth:

Of course, these notions of definition, meaning and synonymy would themselves need to be clarified, But they were thought at the time to be sufficiently obvious notions whose clarification didn’t seem particularly urgent until W.V.O. Quine (1953 [1980a]) raised serious questions about them much later (see §3.3ff below). Putting those questions to one side, Frege made spectacularly interesting suggestions, offering a famous definition, for example, of the “ancestral” relation involved in (11) as a basis for his definition of number (see Frege’s Theorem and Foundations for Arithmetic ), and inspiring the program of “logicism” (or the reduction of arithmetic to logic) that was pursued in Whitehead and Russell’s (1910–13) monumental Principia Mathematica , and the (early) Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1922) Tractatus Logico-philosophicus .

Frege was mostly interested in formalizing arithmetic, and so considered the logical forms of a relative minority of natural language sentences in a deliberately spare notation – he didn’t take on the likes of (12)-(13). But work on the logical (or syntactic) structure of the full range of sentences of natural language has blossomed since then, initially in the work of Bertrand Russell (1905), in his famous theory of definite descriptions (see Descriptions ), which he (1912) combined with his views about the knowledge by “acquaintance” with sense-data and universals into a striking “fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions”:

Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted (1912:58),

an early version of a proposal pursued by Logical Positivists, to be discussed in the next sections below. Frege’s and Russell’s formalizations are also indirectly the inspiration for the subsequent work of Noam Chomsky and other “generative” linguists and logicians (see supplement) . Whether Frege’s criterion of analyticity will work for the rest of II and other analyticities depends upon the details of these latter proposals, some of which are discussed in the supplement ,

2. High Hopes

Influenced by these developments in logic, many philosophers in the first half of the Twentieth Century thought analyticity could perform crucial epistemological work not only in accounting for our apparently a priori knowledge of mathematics, but also —with a little help from British empiricism—of our understanding of claims about the spatiotemporal world as well. Indeed, “analysis” and the “linguistic turn” (Rorty, 1992) soon came to constitute the very way many Anglophone philosophers characterized their work, particularly since such analyses of what we mean by our words seemed to be the sort of enterprise available to “armchair reflection” that seemed to many a distinctive feature of that work (see Haug, 2014). Many thought this project would also perform the more metaphysical work of explaining the truth and necessity of mathematics, showing not only how it is we could know about these topics independently of experience, but how they could be true in this and in all possible worlds , usually, though, without distinguishing this project from the epistemic one. Thus, Gilbert Harman (1967 [1999] begins his review of the topic combining the two projects:

What I shall call a ‘full-blooded theory of analytic truth’ takes the analytic truths to be those that hold solely by virtue of meaning or that are knowable solely by virtue of meaning. (p. 119, see also p. 127),

taking himself to be expressing the views of a number of other then contemporary philosophers.

This seemed like a grand unified plan until Saul Kripke (1972) and Hilary Putnam (1975) drew attention to fundamental differences between the metaphysical and epistemic modalities that had tended to be run together throughout this period. They pointed out that, for example, “water is H2O” might well be necessarily true, but not knowable a priori , and “The meter stick in Paris is one meter long” might be knowable a priori but not be necessarily true (that very stick might have been broken and never used for measurements; see A Priori Justification and Knowledge ).

Once the metaphysical and epistemic issues are separated, it becomes less obvious that mere matters of meaning could really explain all necessities . Recall that Frege’s ambition had been to reduce mathematics to logic by showing how, substituting synonyms for synonyms, every mathematical truth could be shown to be a logical one. He hadn’t gone on to claim that the logical truths themselves were true or necessary by virtue of meaning alone. These were “Laws of Truth” (Frege, 1918/84:58), and it wasn’t clear what sort of explanation could be provided for them. Obviously, appealing merely to further synonym substitutions wouldn’t suffice. As Michael Devitt (1993a) pointed out:

the sentence ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ is not true solely in virtue of meaning and so is not analytic in the…sense [of true in virtue of meaning alone]. The sentence is indeed true partly in virtue of the fact that ‘unmarried’ must refer to anything that ‘bachelor’ refers to but it is also true partly in virtue of the truth of ‘All unmarrieds are unmarried.’ (Devitt 1993a, p. 287; cf., Quine 1956 [1976], p. 118)

It was certainly not clear that the truth of “All unmarrieds are unmarrieds” is based on the same sort of arbitrary synonymy facts that underlie “All bachelors are unmarried.” In any event, a different kind of account seemed to be needed (see footnotes 9 and 16 ).

Jerrold Katz and Paul Postal (1991, pp. 516–7) did claim that adequate linguistic theory should, inter alia , explain why, if John killed Bill is true, then so is Bill is dead. However, as David Israel (1991) pointed out in reply: “there are facts about English, about what propositions are expressed by certain utterances, and then there is a non-linguistic fact: that one proposition entails another” (p. 571). Utterances of sentences are one thing; the propositions (or thoughts ) many different sentences may express , quite another, and the two shouldn’t be confused:

It is just not true that if the proposition expressed by [an utterance of John killed Bill ] is true that, then “in virtue of [natural language] so, necessarily, is” the proposition expressed by [an utterance of Bill is dead ]. Rather, if the proposition that, according to the grammar of English, is expressed by [an utterance of John killed Bill ] is true, then, in virtue of the structure of the propositions concerned, the proposition that, according to the grammar of English, is expressed by [an utterance of Bill is dead ] must also be true.--(D. Israel, 1991, p. 71, emphasis added)

Providing the metaphysical basis for logical truth is a fine issue (see Logical Truth ), but as Devitt (1993a and b) and others (e.g., Paul Boghossian, 1996, Williamson, 2007) went on to stress, it has been the epistemological issues about justifying our beliefs in necessary truths that have dominated philosophical discussions of the analytic in the last seventy years. [ 4 ] Consequently, we will focus primarily on this more modest, epistemological project in the remainder of this entry.

As we noted (§1.2), Frege had developed formal logic to account for our apparently a priori knowledge of mathematics. It is worth dwelling on the interest of this problem. It is arguably one of the oldest and hardest problems in Western philosophy, and is easy enough to understand: ordinarily we acquire knowledge about the world by using our senses. If we are interested, for example, in whether it’s raining outside, how many birds are on the beach, whether fish sleep or stars collapse, we look and see, or turn to others who do. It is a widespread view that Western sciences owe their tremendous successes precisely to relying on just such “empirical” (experiential, experimental) methods. However, it is also a patent fact about all these sciences, and even our ordinary ways of counting birds, fish and stars, that they depend on often immensely sophisticated mathematics, and mathematics does not seem to be known on the basis of experience. Mathematicians don’t do experiments in the way that chemists, biologists or other “natural scientists” do. They seem simply to think , seeming to rely precisely on the kind of “armchair reflection” to which many philosophers also aspire. In any case, they don’t try to justify their claims by reference to experiments, arguing that twice two is four by noting that pairs of pairs tend in all cases observed so far to be quadruples.

But how could mere processes of thought issue in any knowledge about the independently existing external world? The belief that it could would seem to involve some kind of mysticism; and, indeed, many “naturalistic” philosophers have felt that the appeals of “Rationalist” philosophers to some special faculty of “rational intuition,” such as one finds in philosophers like Plato, Descartes and Leibniz and, more recently, Katz (1988, 1990), George Bealer (1987) and Laurence Bonjour (1998), these all seem no better off than appeals to “revelation” to establish theology. The program of logicism and “analysis” seemed to many to offer a more promising, “naturalistic” alternative.

But why stop at arithmetic? If logical analysis could illuminate the foundations of mathematics by showing how the axioms of arithmetic could all be derived from pure logic by substitution of synonyms, perhaps it could also illuminate the foundations of the rest of our knowledge by showing how its claims could similarly be derived from some kind of combination of logic and experience. Such was the hope and program of Logical Positivism (see Logical Empiricism ) championed by, e.g., Moritz Schlick, A.J. Ayer and, especially, Rudolf Carnap from about 1915 in Vienna and Berlin to well into the 1950s in England and America. Of course, such a proposal did presume that all of our concepts were somehow “derived” either from logic or experience, but this seemed in keeping with the then prevailing presumptions of empiricism, which, they assumed, had been vindicated by the immense success of the empirical sciences.

For the Positivists, earlier empiricists, such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume, had erred only in thinking that the mechanism of construction was mere association. But association can’t account for the structure of even a simple judgment, such as Caesar is bald . This is not merely the excitation of its constituent ideas, Caesar , is , and bald , along the lines of the idea of salt exciting the idea of pepper , but, as Frege had shown, involves combining the noun Caesar and the predicate is bald in a very particular way, a fact that was important in accounting for more complex judgments such as Caesar is bald or not bald , or Someone is bald . Our thoughts and claims about the world have some kind of logical structure , of a sort that seems to begin to be revealed by Frege’s proposals. Equipped with his logic, it was possible to provide a more plausible formulation of conceptual empiricism: our claims about the empirical world were to be analyzed into the (dis)confirming experiences out of which they must somehow have been logically constructed.

But constructed out of which experiences? For the Positivists, the answer seemed obvious: out of the experiential tests that would standardly justify , verify or confirm the claim. Indeed, as Ayer (1934, chap 1) made plain, a significant motivation for the Positivists was to save empirical knowledge from the predations of traditional sceptical arguments about the possibility that all of life is a dream or the deception of an evil demon: if meaning could be tied to verification, such possibilities could be rendered “meaningless” because unverifiable (see Jerry Fodor, 2001, pp. 3–5, for a penetrating discussion of this motivation). In any event, interpreting Wittgenstein’s (1922) Tractatus claims about the nature of language epistemologically along the lines of the American philosopher, C.S. Peirce, they proposed various versions of their “Verifiability Theory of Meaning,” according to which the meaning (or what they called the “cognitive significance”) of any sentence was constituted by the conditions of its empirical (dis-)confirmation. [ 5 ] Thus, to say that the temperature of a liquid is of a certain magnitude is to say, for example, that the mercury in a thermometer immersed in the liquid would expand to a certain point marked by a numeral representing that magnitude, a claim that would ordinarily be disconfirmed if it didn’t. Closer to “experience”: to say that there is a cat on a mat is just to say that certain patterns of certain familiar visual, tactile and aural appearances are to be expected under certain circumstances.

The project of providing analyses in this way of especially problematic concepts like those concerning, for example, material objects, knowledge, perception, causation, expectation, freedom , and the self , was pursued by Positivists and other analytic philosophers for a considerable period (see Carnap 1928 [1967] for some rigorous examples, Ayer 1934 [1952] for more accessible ones). With regard to material object claims, the program came to be known as “phenomenalism”; with regard to the theoretical claims of science, as “operationalism” ; and with regard to the claims about people’s mental lives, “analytical behaviorism” (the relevant experiential basis of mental claims being taken to be observations of others’ behavior). Although these programs became extremely influential, and some form of the verifiability criterion was often (and sometimes still is) invoked in physics and psychology to constrain theoretical speculation, they seldom, if ever, met with any serious success. No sooner was an analysis, say, of “material object” or “freedom” or “expectation,” proposed than serious counterexamples were raised and the analysis revised, only to be faced with still further counterexamples (see Roderick Chisholm 1957, and Fodor 1981, for discussion). Despite what seemed its initial plausibility, philosophers came to suspect that the criterion, and with it the very notion of analyticity itself, rested on some fundamental mistakes.

3. Problems with the Distinction

One problem with the entire program was raised by C.H. Langford (1942) and discussed by G.E. Moore (1942 [1968], pp. 665–6): why should analyses be of any conceivable interest? After all, if an analysis consists in providing the definition of an expression, then it should be providing a synonym for it, and this, then, should be wholly uninformative: if brother is analyzed as the presumably synonymous male sibling , then the claim Brothers are male siblings should be synonymous with Brothers are brothers , and thinking the one should be no different from thinking the other. But, aside from such simple cases as brother and bachelor , proposed analyses, if successful, often seemed quite non-obvious and philosophically informative. The proposed reductions of, say, material object statements to sensory ones (even where successful) were often fairly complex, had to be studied and learned, and so could hardly be uninformative. So how could they count as seriously analytic? [ 6 ]

This is “the paradox of analysis,” which can be seen as dormant in Frege’s own move from his (1884) focus on definitions to his more controversial (1892a) doctrine of “sense,” where two senses are distinct if and only if someone can think a thought containing the one but not other, as in the case of the senses of “the morning star” and “the evening star.” If analyses or definitions preserved sense, then, unlike the case of “morning star” and “evening star,” whenever one thought the definiendum, one should thereby be thinking the definiens. And perhaps one can’t think Bill is Bob’s brother without thinking Bill is Bob’s male sibling. But few of Frege’s definitions of arithmetic concepts are nearly so simple (see Gottlob Frege , §2.5). In their case, it seems perfectly possible to think the definiendum, say, number , without thinking the elaborate definiens Frege provided (cf. Bealer 1982, Michael Dummett 1991, and John Horty 1993, 2007, for extensive discussions of this problem, as well as of further conditions, e.g., fecundity , that Frege placed on serious definitions).

These problems, so far, can be regarded as relatively technical, for which further technical moves within the program might be made. For example, one might make further distinctions within the theory of sense between an expression’s “content” and the specific “linguistic vehicle” used for its expression, as in Fodor (1990a) and Horty (1993, 2007); and perhaps distinguish between the truth-conditional “content” of an expression and its idiosyncratic role, or “character,” in a language system, along the lines of the distinction David Kaplan (1989) introduced to deal with indexical and demonstrative expressions (such as I , now , and that ; see Demonstratives , and Narrow Mental Content , as well as Stephen White, 1982). Perhaps analyses could be regarded as providing a particular “vehicle,” having a specific “character,” that could account for why one could entertain a certain concept without entertaining its analysis (cf. Gillian Russell 2008, and Paul Pietroski 2002, 2005 and 2018 for related suggestions).

However, the problems with the program seemed to many philosophers to be deeper than merely technical. By far, the most telling and influential of the criticisms both of the program, and then of analyticity in general, were those of Quine, who began as a great champion of the program (see esp. his 1934), and whose subsequent objections therefore carry special weight. The reader is well-advised to consult particularly his (1956 [1976], hereafter “CLT”) for as rich and deep a discussion of the issues up to that time as one might find. The next two sections abbreviate some of that discussion.

Although pursuit of the logicist program produced a great many insights into the nature of mathematics, there emerged a number of serious difficulties with it. Right from the start there was, of course, the problem of the logical truths themselves. Simply saying, as Frege had, that they are “Laws of Truth” doesn’t seem to explain how we could know them a priori . But perhaps they, too, are “analytic” involving perhaps some sort of “implicit” acceptance of certain rules merely by virtue of accepting certain patterns of reasoning. But any such proposal has to account for people’s frequent, often apparent violations of rules of logic in fallacious reasoning and in ordinary speech, as well as of disputes about the laws of logic of the sort that are raised, for example, by mathematical intuitionists, who deny the Law of Excluded Middle (“p or not p”), or, more recently, by “para-consistent” logicians, who argue for the toleration even of contradictions to avoid certain paradoxes. [ 7 ] Moreover, given that the infinitude of logical truths needs to be “generated” by rules of inference, wouldn’t that be a reason for regarding them as “synthetic” in Kant’s sense (see Frege 1884 [1980], §88, Katz 1988, pp. 58–9, and MacFarlane 2002)?

Much more worrisome is a challenge raised by Quine (CLT, §II): even if certain logical truths seemed undeniable, how does claiming them to be analytic differ from claiming them to be simply “obvious”? [ 8 ]

Consider…the logical truth “Everything is self-identical”, “(x)(x = x)”. We can say that it depends for its truth on traits of the language (specifically on the usage of “=”), and not on traits of its subject matter; but we can also say, alternatively, that it depends on an obvious trait, viz., self-identity, of its subject matter, viz., everything. The tendency of [my] present reflections is that there is no difference. (CLT, p. 113)

Pressing the point more deeply:

I have been using the vaguely psychological word “obvious” non-technically, assigning it no explanatory value. My suggestion is merely that the linguistic doctrine of elementary logical truth likewise leaves explanation unbegun. I do not suggest that the linguistic doctrine is false and some doctrine of ultimate and inexplicable insight into the obvious trait of reality is true, but only that there is no real difference between these two pseudo-doctrines. (CLT, p. 113)

As we’ll see, this is the seed for the challenge that continues to haunt proposals about the analytic to this day: what explanatory difference is there between “analytic” claims and simply widely and firmly held beliefs, such as that The earth has existed for many years or There have been black dogs ? We’ll consider some proposals —and their problems— in due course, but it’s important to bear in mind that, if no difference can be sustained, then it’s difficult to see the significance of the logicist program or of the claims of (strictly) “analytic” philosophy generally.

The most immediately calamitous challenge to Logicism was, however, the famous paradox Russell raised for one of Frege’s crucial axioms, his prima facie plausible “Basic Law V” (sometimes called “the unrestricted Comprehension Axiom”), which had committed him to the existence of a set for every predicate. But what, asked Russell, of the predicate x is not a member of itself ? If there were a set for that predicate, that set itself would be a member of itself if and only if it wasn’t; consequently, there could be no such set. Therefore Frege’s Basic Law V couldn’t be true (but see Frege’s Theorem and Foundations for Arithmetic for ways to rescue something close to logicism, discussed in §5 below).

What was especially upsetting about Russell’s paradox was that there seemed to be no intuitively satisfactory way to repair set theory in a way that could lay claim to being as obvious and/or merely a matter of logic or meaning in the way that Frege and the Positivists had hoped. Various proposals were made, but all of them seemed simply tailor-made to avoid the paradox, and seemed to have little independent appeal (although see Boolos, 1971, for a defense of the “iterative” notion of set). Certainly none of them appeared to be analytic. Indeed, as Quine notes:

What we do [in set theory] is develop one or another set theory by obvious reasoning, or elementary logic, from unobvious first principles which are set down, whether for good or for the time being, by something like convention. (CLT, p. 111)

Convention, indeed, would seem to be at the very heart of the analytic. After all, aren’t matters of meaning, unlike matters of fact, in the end really matters of arbitrary conventions about the use of words? For example, someone could invest a particular word, say, “schmuncle,” with a specific meaning merely by stipulating that it mean, say, unmarried uncle. Wouldn’t that afford a basis for claiming then that “A schmuncle is an uncle” is analytic, or knowable to be true by virtue of the (stipulated) meanings of the words alone?

Carnap (1956a) proposed setting out the “meaning postulates” of a scientific language as just such conventional stipulations. This had the further advantage of allowing terms to be “implicitly defined” by their conventional roles in such postulates, which might then serve as part of a theory’s laws or axioms. The strategy seemed especially appropriate for defining logical constants, as well as for dealing with cases like (11)-(13) above, e.g. “Red is a color,” where mere substitution of synonyms might not suffice. [ 9 ] So perhaps what philosophical analysis is doing is revealing the tacit conventions of ordinary language, an approach particularly favored by Ayer (1934/52).

Quine is sceptical such a strategy could work for the principles of logic itself. Drawing on his earlier discussion (1936 [1976]) of the conventionality of logic, he argues that logic itself could not be entirely established by such conventions, since:

the logical truths, being infinite in number, must be given by general conventions rather than singly; and logic is needed then in the meta-theory, in order to apply the general conventions to individual cases (CLT, p. 115)

If so, and if logic is established by convention, then one would need a meta -meta-theory to establish the conventions for the use of the logical particles of the meta-theory, and so on for what seemed like an infinite regress of meta-theories. This is certainly an argument that ought to give the proponents of the conventionality of logic pause: for, indeed, how could one hope to set out the general conventions for “all” or “if…then…” without at some point using the notions of “all” and “if…then…” (“ALL instances of a universal quantification are to be true”. “IF p is one premise, and if p then q another, THEN conclude q ”)? (See Warren, 2017, however, for a reply, exploiting the resources of implicit definition; cf. fns 9 and 16.)

As we noted, Quine sees more room for convention in choosing between different, incompatible versions of set theory needed for mathematics that were developed in the wake of Russell’s paradox. Here:

We find ourselves making deliberate choices and setting them forth unaccompanied by any attempt at justification other than in terms of elegance and convenience. (CLT, p. 117).

But then it’s hard to see the difference between mathematics and the conventional “meaning postulates” Carnap had proposed for establishing the rest of science —and then the difference between them and any other claims of a theory. As Quine goes on to argue, although stipulative definitions (what he calls “legislative postulations”)

contribute truths which become integral to the corpus of truths, the artificiality of their origin does not linger as a localized quality, but suffuses the corpus. If a subsequent expositor singles out those once legislatively postulated truths again as postulates, this signifies nothing… He could as well choose his postulates from elsewhere in the corpus, and will if he thinks it this serves his expository ends. (CLT, pp. 119–20)

Carnap’s legislated “meaning postulates” should therefore be regarded as just an arbitrary selection of sentences a theory presents as true, a selection perhaps useful for purposes of exposition, but no more significant than the selection of certain towns in Ohio as “starting points” for a journey Quine (1953 [1980a], p. 35).

Quine’s observation certainly seems to accord with scientific practice. Suppose, say, Newton, himself, had explicitly set out “F=ma” as a stipulated definition of “F”: would “F=ma” be therefore justifiable by knowing the meaning the words alone? Our taking such a stipulation seriously would seem to depend upon our view of the plausibility of the surrounding theory as a whole. After all, as Quine continues:

[S]urely the justification of any theoretical hypothesis can, at the time of hypothesis, consist in no more than the elegance and convenience which the hypothesis brings to the containing bodies of laws and data. How then are we to delimit the category of legislative postulation, short of including under it every new act of scientific hypothesis? (CLT, p. 121)

So conventional legislation of claims, such as Carnap’s meaning postulates, affords the claims no special status. As vivid examples, Putnam (1965 [1975]) discusses in detail revisions of the definitions of “straight line” and “kinetic energy” in the light of Einstein’s theories of relativity. [ 10 ]

This appeal to “the containing bodies of laws and data” essentially invokes Quine’s famous holistic metaphor of the “web of belief” with which CLT eloquently concludes:

the lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences [which] develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale grey lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones (CLT, p. 132) [ 11 ]

3.4 Verification and Confirmation Holism

The picture presented in this last and many similar passages expresses a tremendously influential view of Quine’s that led several generations of philosophers to despair not only of the analytic-synthetic distinction, but of the category of a priori knowledge entirely. The view has come to be called “confirmation holism,” and Quine had expressed it more shortly a few years earlier, in his widely read article, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1953 [1980a]):

Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually, but only as a corporate body. (1953 [1980a], p. 41)

Indeed, the “two dogmas” that the article discusses are (i) the belief in the intelligibility of the “analytic” itself, and (ii), what Quine regards as the flip side of the same coin, the belief that “each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation at all” (p. 41), i.e., the very version of the Verifiability Theory of Meaning we have seen the Positivists enlisted in their effort to “analyze” the claims of science and commonsense. [ 12 ]

Quine bases his “confirmation holism” upon observations of Pierre Duhem (1914 [1954]), who drew attention to the myriad ways in which theories are supported by evidence, and the fact that an hypothesis is not (dis)confirmed merely by some specific experiment considered in isolation from an immense amount of surrounding theory. Thus, a thermometer will be a good indication of ambient temperature only if it’s made of the right materials, calibrated appropriately, and there aren’t any other forces at work that might disturb the measurement—and, of course, only if the background laws of physics and other beliefs that have informed the design of the measurement are sufficiently correct. A failure of the thermometer to measure the temperature could be due to a failure of any of these other conditions, which is, of course, why experimenters spend so much time and money constructing experiments to “control” for them. Moreover, with a small change in our theories or background beliefs, or just in our understanding of the conditions for measurement, we might change the tests on which we rely, but often without changing the meaning of the sentences whose truth we might be trying to establish (which, as Putnam 1965 [1975] pointed out, is precisely what practicing scientists regularly do).

What is novel—and highly controversial—about Quine’s understanding of these commonplace observations is his extension of them to claims presumed by most people (e.g., by Duhem himself) to lie outside their scope, viz., the whole of mathematics and even logic! It is this extension that seems to undermine the traditional a priori status of these latter domains, since it appears to open the possibility of a revision of logic, mathematics and any supposed analytic claims in the interest of the plausibility of the one, overall resulting empirical theory—containing the empirical claims and those of logic, mathematics and the analytic! Perhaps this wouldn’t be so odd should the revisability of such claims permit their ultimately admitting of a justification that didn’t involve experience. But this is ruled out by Quine’s insistence that scientific theories, along with their logic and mathematics, are confirmed “ only ” as “corporate bodies.” [ 13 ]

One might wonder why, though, there have historically been virtually no revisions of mathematics on empirical grounds. A common example offered is how Riemannian replaced Euclidean geometry in Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. But this mis-interprets the history. Non-Euclidean geometries were purely conceptual developments in the 19th C. by mathematicians such as Gauss, Riemann and Lobechevsky. Einstein simply argued in 1916 that one of these conceptual possibilities seemed to be better supported by physics than was the traditional Euclidean one, and should therefore be taken to be true of actual space(-time). It is only this latter claim that is empirical.

Certainly, though, Quine’s holism has been an epistemic possibility that many have taken seriously. For example, influenced by Quine’s claim, Putnam (1968 [1975]) argued that one ought to revise even elementary logic in view of the surprising results of quantum mechanics (a proposal not without its critics, see Quantum Logic and Probability Theory ). And in his (1962 [1975] he also argued that it isn’t hard to imagine discovering that a purported analytic truth, such as Cats are animals , could be given up in light of discovering that the little things are really cleverly disguised robots controlled from Mars (but see Katz, 1990, pp. 216ff and G. Russell, 2008, for replies, and the supplement §3 for further discussion).

Quine’s discussion of the role of convention in science seems right; but how about the role of meaning in ordinary natural language (cf. Chomsky’s 2000 cautions mentioned in footnote 10 )? Is it really true that in the “pale grey lore” of all the sentences we accept, there aren’t some that are “white” somehow “by virtue of the very meanings of their words”? What about our examples in our earlier set II? What about sentences of the sort that interest Juhl and Loomis (2010) that merely link patent synonyms, as in “Lawyers are attorneys,” or “A fortnight is a period of fourteen days”? As Grice and Strawson (1956) and Putnam (1965 [1975]) pointed out, it is unlikely that so intuitively plausible a distinction should turn out to have no basis at all in fact.

Quine addressed this issue, first, in his (1953 [1980a], chapter 3), and then in a much larger way in his (1960, chapter 2, and 1974) and related articles. In his (1953 [1980a]) he pressed his objection to analyticity further to the very ideas of synonymy and the linguistic meaning of an expression, on which, we saw, Frege’s criterion of analyticity crucially relied. His objection is that he sees no way to make any serious explanatory sense of them. He explored plausible explanations in terms of “definition,” “intension,” “possibility,” and “contradiction,”, pointing out that each of these notions seems to stand in precisely as much need of explanation as synonymy itself (recall our observation in §1.2 above regarding the lack of any formal contradiction in “Some pediatricans aren’t doctors”). The terms seem to be mutually definable in what seems to be a—viciously?—small “closed curve in space” (Quine 1953 [1980a], p. 30). Though they might be invoked to explain one another, they could not in the end answer the challenge of how to distinguish an analytic claim from simply a tenaciously held belief.

To take a recent example, David Chalmers (2012) revisits Carnap’s (1956b) proposal for basing synonymy on “intension” by way of eliciting a person’s judgments about the extension of a term/concept in all possible worlds: [ 14 ]

Carnap’s key idea is that we can investigate the intension that a subject associated with an expression by investigating the subject’s judgments about possible cases. To determine the intension of an expression such as ‘Pferd’ for a subject, we present the subject with descriptions of various logically possible cases, and we ask the subject whether he or she is willing to apply the term ‘Pferd’ to objects specified in these cases. If we do this for enough cases, then we can test all sorts of hypotheses about the intension of the expression. (Chalmers 2012, p. 204)

But how are the informants to understand the questions they’re being asked? If they understand the term “possible” as logicians do, as truth in a set-theoretically specified model , then it will be too weak: there are obviously models in which synonymous expressions e.g., “horse” and “Pferd,” or “bachelor” and “unmarried male ” are assigned non-overlapping sets (cf. Quine [1953 [1980a], pp. 22–3), so that it’s logically possible for there be a horse that’s not a Pferd, or a bachelor that’s married (again, “a married bachelor” is formally contradictory only if one substitutes synonyms for synonyms; but we certainly can’t appeal to synonymy in trying to define synonymy). But if “possible” is understood (as it ordinarily would be) as merely imaginable , then it will be far too strong, ruling out ideas that the scientifically under-informed might find impossible, e.g., curved space-time, something having the properties of both waves and particles, or completely unconscious thoughts (which, at least, e.g., John Searle 1992, pp. 155–6, and Galen Strawson 1994, pp. 166–7 report having trouble conceiving). As Quine (1953 [1980a]) famously argued, such appeals to informant verdicts will only work if the informants understand the questions as about the very terms the proposed test is supposed to define , viz., “possible” as constrained by synonymy or preservation of meaning. Although, as many have noted (e.g., Williamson 2007, p. 50), there may be explanatory circularities in the best of theories, the circularity here seems particularly vicious, with the relevant ideas appearing not to perform any explanatory work other than bringing in each other’s laundry.

Why was Quine so convinced of this last claim? Because he thought it was possible to provide a satisfactory explanation of human language without them, indeed, without any mentalistic notions at all. In his (1953 [1980b], 1960 [2013] and 1974) he sketched a behavioristic theory of language that doesn’t rely on the postulation of determinate meaning or reference, and argued that, indeed, translation is “indeterminate”: there is “no fact of the matter” about whether two expressions do or do not have the same meaning (see Indeterminacy of Translation ). This would appear to imply that there are pretty much no facts of the matter about people’s mental lives at all! For, if there is no fact of the matter about whether two people mean the same thing by their words, then there is no fact of the matter about the content of anyone’s thoughts. Quine himself took this consequence in stride—he was, after all, a behaviorist– regarding it as “of a piece” with Franz Brentano’s (1874 [1995]) famous thesis of the “irreducibility of the intentional”; it’s just that for him, unlike for Brentano, it simply showed the “baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention” (1960 [2013], p. 202). Needless to say, many subsequent philosophers have not been happy with this view, and have wondered where Quine’s argument went wrong.

3.6 Explaining Away the Appearance of the Analytic

One problem many have had with Quine’s argument is about how to explain the appearance of the analytic. It just seems an empirical fact that most people would spontaneously distinguish our original two sets of sentences (§1) by saying that sentences of the second set, such as “All pediatricians are doctors for children” are “true by definition,” or could be known to be true just by knowing the meanings of the constituent words. Moreover, they might agree about an indefinite number of further examples, e.g., that ophthalmologists are eye doctors, grandfathers are parents of parents, sauntering a kind of movement, pain and beliefs mental states, and promising an intentional act. Again, as Grice and Strawson (1956) and Putnam (1965 [1975]) stressed, it’s implausible to suppose that there’s nothing people are getting at in these judgments.

Quine’s (1953 [1980a]) initial explanation of the appearance of the analytic invoked his metaphor of the web of belief, claiming that sentences are more or less revisable, depending upon how “peripheral” or “central” their position is in the web, the more peripheral ones being closer to experience. The appearance of sentences being “analytic” is simply due to their being, like the laws of logic and mathematics, comparatively central, and so are given up, if ever, only under extreme pressure from the peripheral forces of experience. But no sentence is absolutely immune from revision; all sentences are thereby empirical, and none is actually analytic.

There are a number of problems with this explanation. In the first place, centrality and the appearance of analyticity don’t seem to be so closely related. As Quine (1960, p. 66) himself noted, there are are plenty of central, unrevisable beliefs that don’t seem remotely analytic, e.g., “There have been black dogs,” “The earth has existed for more than five minutes,” “Mass-energy is conserved”; and many standard examples of what seem analytic aren’t seriously central: “Bachelors are unmarried,” “A fortnight is two weeks” or “A beard is facial hair” are pretty trivial verbal issues, and could easily be revised if people really cared (cf., Juhl and Loomis, 2010, p. 118).

Secondly, it’s not mere unrevisability that seems distinctive of the analytic, but rather a certain sort of unintelligibility : for all the unrevisability of “There have been black dogs,” it’s perfectly possible to imagine it to be false. In contrast, what’s peculiar about analytic claims is that their denials often seem peculiarly impossible to seriously think: it seems distinctively impossible to imagine a married bachelor. Now, of course, as we noted, this could be due simply to a failure of imagination. But what’s striking about about the unrevisability of many apparently analytic cases is that they don’t appear to be like scientifically controversial cases such as curved space-time or completely unconscious thoughts. The standard cases about, e.g., bachelors or pediatricians seem entirely innocuous. Far from unrevisability explaining analyticity, it would seem to be analyticity that explains this peculiar unrevisability : the only reason someone might balk at denying bachelors are unmarried is that, well, that’s just what the word “bachelor” means! [ 15 ] The challenge, though, is to clarify the basis for this sort of explanation.

It is important to note here a crucial change that Quine (and earlier Positivists) casually introduced into the characterization of the a priori , and consequently into much of the now common understanding of the analytic. Where Kant and others had traditionally assumed that the a priori concerned beliefs “justifiable independently of experience,” Quine and many other philosophers of the time came to regard it as consisting of beliefs “unrevisable in the light of experience.” And, as we have seen, a similar status is accorded the at least apparently analytic. However, this would imply that people taking something to be analytic or a priori would have to regard themselves as being infallible about it, forever unwilling to revise it in light of further evidence or argument. But this is a further claim that many defenders of the traditional notions need not embrace (consider, again, the disputes philosophers have about the proper analysis of terms such as “knowledge” or “freedom”).

Indeed, a claim might be in fact analytic and justifiable independently of experience, but nevertheless perfectly well revised in the light of it. Experience, after all, might mislead us, as it (perhaps) misled Putnam when he suggested revising logic in light of difficulties in quantum mechanics, or suggested revising “cats are animals,” were we to discover the things were robots. Just which claims are genuinely analytic and a priori might not be available in the “armchair” at the introspective or behavioral surface of our lives in the way that Quine and much of the philosophical tradition has assumed. Certainly the “dispositions to assent or dissent from sentences” on which Quine (1960 [2013], chapter 2) standardly relied are likely very dubious guides (see the findings of “experimental philosophy” discussed in §4.1 below). Behavioral dispositions in general may have any of a variety of aetiologies that aren’t clearly distinguishable in actual behavior (one wonders how much of Quine’s seamless epistemology went hand in hand with his mentalistically seamless behavioristic psychology). The relevant dispositions might be hidden more deeply in our minds, and our access to them as fallible as our access to any other such facts about ourselves. The genuinely analytic may be a matter of difficult reflective analysis or deep linguistic theory (see Bealer, 1987, Bonjour 1998, Rey, 1998, and supplement ), a possibility to which we will return shortly.

In his expansion of Quine’s point, Putnam (1962 [1975]) tried to rescue what he thought were theoretically innocuous examples of analytic truths by appeal to what he called “one-criterion” concepts, or concepts like, e.g., pediatrician, bachelor, widow , where there seems to be only one “way to tell” whether they apply. However, as Fodor (1998) pointed out, so stated, this latter account won’t suffice either, since the notion of “criterion” seems no better off than “meaning” or “analytic.” Moreover, if there were one way to tell what’s what, there would seem, trivially, to be indefinite numbers of other ways: look for some reliable correlate (living alone, frequenting singles bars for “bachelor”), or, just ask someone who knows the one way; or ask someone who knows someone who knows; or…, etc., and so now we would be faced with saying which of these ways is genuinely “criterial,” which would seem to leave us with the same problem we faced in saying which way appears to be “analytic.”

Fodor (1998) tried to improve on Putnam’s proposal by suggesting that a criterion that appears to be analytic is the one on which all the other criteria depend, but which does not depend upon them. Thus, telling that someone is a bachelor by checking out his gender and marriage status doesn’t depend upon telling by asking his friends, but telling by asking his friends does depend upon telling by his gender and marriage status; and so we have an explanation of why “bachelors are unmarried males” seems analytic, but, said Fodor, without it’s actually being so (perhaps somewhat surprisingly, given his general “asymmetric dependence” theory of content, see his 1990b and Rey, 2009, to be discussed shortly, §§4.2–4.3).

However, such asymmetric dependencies among criteria alone will not “explain (away)” either the reality or the appearance of the analytic, since there would appear to be asymmetric dependencies of the proposed sort in non-analytic cases. Natural kinds are dramatic cases in point (see Putnam 1962 [1975], 1970 [1975], 1975). At some stage in history probably the only way anyone could tell whether something was a case of polio was to see whether there was a certain constellation of standard symptoms, e.g. paralysis; other ways (including asking others) asymmetrically depended upon that way. But this wouldn’t make “All polio cases exhibit paralysis” remotely analytic—after all, the standard symptoms for many diseases can sometimes be quite misleading. It required serious empirical research to discover the proper definition of a natural kind term like “polio.” Precisely as Putnam otherwise stressed, methods of testing are so variable it is doubtful that even “single criterion” tests could provide a basis for the identification of the stable meanings of words.

Indeed, as many philosophers in the wake of Quine’s and Putnam’s work came to suspect, the recourse of philosophy in general to epistemology to ground semantics may have been a fundamental mistake. It was an enticing recourse: it seemed to offer a way to dispatch philosophical disputes and secure empirical knowledge from sceptical challenges regarding demons and dreams. But the above difficulties suggested that those disputes and challenges would need to be met in some other way, perhaps by looking not to words, but to the world instead.

3.6.3 The World, not Words

Indeed, another strategy that a Quinean can deploy to explain the appearance of the analytic is to claim that analyses are really not of the meanings of words , but of the actual phenomena in the world to which they refer (see Fodor, 1990b, 1998). Thus, claims that, e.g., cats are animals, triangles are three-sided, or that every number has a successor should not be construed as claims about the meanings of the words “cat”, “triangle” or “number,” but about the nature of cats, triangles and numbers themselves. Arguably, many such claims, if they are true, are necessarily so (cf., Kripke, 1972; Putnam, 1975), and may be commonly understood to be, and this might make them seem analytic. But then we would be faced with precisely the challenge that Quine raised: how to distinguish claims of analyticity from simply deeply held beliefs about “the nature” of things.

This recourse to the world may, however, be a little too swift. Cases of (arguably) deeply explanatory natural kinds such as polio or cats contrast dramatically with cases of more superficial kinds like bachelor or fortnight . whose natures are not specified by any explanatory science, but are pretty much exhausted by what would seem to be the meanings of the words. Again, unlike the case of polio and its symptoms, the reason that gender and marriage status are the best way to tell whether someone is a bachelor is, again, that that’s just what “bachelor” means. Indeed, should a doctor propose revising the test for polio in the light of better theory—perhaps reversing the dependency of certain tests—this would not even begin to appear to involve a change in the meaning of the term. Should, however, a feminist propose, in the light of better politics, revising the use of “bachelor” to include women, this obviously would. If the appearance of the analytic is to be explained away, it needs to account for such differences in our understanding of different sorts of revisions in our beliefs, which don’t appear to be issues regarding the external world.

4. Post-Quinean Strategies

There has been a wide variety of responses to Quine’s challenges. Some, for example, Davidson (1980), Stich (1983) and Dennett (1987), seem simply to accept it and try to account for our practice of meaning ascription within its “non-factual” bounds. Since they follow Quine in at least claiming to forswear the analytic, we will not consider their views further here. Others, who might be (loosely) called “neo-Cartesians,” reject Quine’s attack as simply so much prejudice of the empiricism and naturalism that they take to be his own uncritical dogmas (§4.1 in what follows). Still others hope simply to find a way to break out of the “intentional circle,” and provide an account of at least what it means for one thing (a state of the brain, for example) to mean (or “carry the information about”) another external phenomenon in the world (§4.2). Perhaps the most trenchant reaction has been that of empirically oriented linguists and philosophers, who look to a specific explanatory role the analytic may play in an account of thought and talk (§4.3). This role is currently being explored in considerable detail in the now various areas of research inspired by the important linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky (§4.4, and supplement, Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics ).

The most unsympathetic response to Quine’s challenges has been essentially to stare him down and insist upon an inner faculty of “intuition” whereby the truth of certain claims is simply “grasped” directly through, as Bonjour (1998) puts it:

an act of rational insight or rational intuition … [that] is seemingly (a) direct or immediate, nondiscursive, and yet also (b) intellectual or reason-governed … [It] depends upon nothing beyond an understanding of the propositional content itself…. (p. 102)

Bealer (1987, 1999) defends similar proposals. Neither Bonjour nor Bealer are in fact particularly concerned to defend the analytic by such claims, but their recourse to mere understanding of propositional content is certainly what many defenders of the analytic have had in mind. Katz (1998, pp. 44–5), for example, explicitly made the very same appeal to intuitions on behalf of the analytic claims supported by his semantic theory. Somewhat more modestly, Peacocke (1992, 2004) claims that possession of certain logical concepts requires that a person find certain inferences “primitively compelling,” or compelling not by reason of some inference that takes “their correctness…as answerable to anything else” (1992, p. 6; see also his 2004, p. 100 and the other references in fn 9 above for the strategy, and fn 7, as well as Harman, 1996 [1999], and Horwich, 2000, for qualms).

Perhaps the simplest reply along these lines emerges from a suggestion of David Lewis (1972 [1980]), who proposes to implicitly define, e.g., psychological terms by conjoining the “platitudes” in which they appear:

Include only platitudes that are common knowledge among us – everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on. For the meanings of our words are common knowledge, and I am going to claim that names of mental states derive their meaning from these platitudes. (1972 [1980], p. 212)

Enlarging on this idea, Frank Jackson (1998) emphasizes the role of intuitions about possible cases, as well as the need sometimes to massage such intuitions so as to arrive at “the hypothesis that best makes sense of [folk] responses” (p. 36; see also pp. 34–5). [ 16 ]

The Quinean reply to all these approaches is, again, his main challenge: how in the end are we to distinguish such claims of “rational insight,” “primitive compulsion,” inferential practices or folk beliefs, from merely some deeply entrenched empirical convictions, folk practices or, indeed, from mere dogmas? Isn’t the history of thought littered with what have turned out to be deeply mistaken claims, inferences and platitudes that people at the time have found “rationally” and/or “primitively compelling,” say, with regard to God, sin, disease, biology, sexuality, or even patterns of reasoning themselves? Again, consider the resistance Kahneman (2011) reports people displaying to correction of the fallacies they commit in a surprising range of ordinary thought (cf. fn 7 above); or in a more disturbing vein, how the gifted mathematician, John Nash, claimed that his delusional ideas “about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did” (Nasar 1998, p. 11). Introspected episodes, primitive compulsions, intuitions about possibilities, or even tacit folk theories alone are not going to distinguish the analytic, since these all may be due as much to people’s (possibly mad!) empirical theories as to any special knowledge of meaning.

A particularly vivid way to feel the force of Quine’s challenge is afforded by a recent case that came before the Ontario Supreme Court concerning whether laws that confined marriage to heterosexual couples violated the equal protection clause of the constitution (see Halpern et al . 2001). The question was regarded as turning in part on the meaning of the word “marriage”, and each party to the dispute solicited affidavits from philosophers, one of whom claimed that the meaning of the word was tied to heterosexuality, another that it wasn’t . Putting aside the complex moral-political issues, Quine’s challenge can be regarded as a reasonably sceptical request to know how any serious theory of the world might settle it. It certainly wouldn’t be sufficient merely to claim that marriage is/isn’t necessarily heterosexual on the basis of common “platitudes,” much less on “an act of rational insight [into] the propositional content itself”; or because speakers found the inference from marriage to heterosexuality “primitively compelling” and couldn’t imagine gay people getting married! [ 17 ]

Indeed, some philosophers have offered some empirical evidence that casts doubt on just how robust the data for the analytic might be. The movement of “experimental philosophy” has pointed to evidence of considerable malleability of subject’s “intuitions” with regard to the standard kinds of thought experiments on which philosophical defenses of analytic claims typically rely. Thus, Weinberg, Nichols and Stich (2001) found significant cultural differences between responses of Asian and Western students regarding whether someone counted as having knowledge in a standard “Gettier” (1963) example of accidental justified true belief; and Knobe (2003) found that non-philosophers’ judgments about whether an action is intentional depended on the (particularly negative) moral qualities of the action, and not, as is presumed by most philosophers, on whether the action was merely intended by the agent. Questions, of course, could be raised about these experimental results (How well did the subjects understand the project of assessing intuitions? Did the experiments sufficiently control for the multitudinous “pragmatic” effects endemic to polling procedures? To what extent are the target terms merely polysemous – see supplement , §3– allowing for different uses in different contexts?) However, the results do serve to show how the determination of meaning and analytic truths can be regarded as a far more difficult empirical question than philosophers have traditionally supposed (see Bishop and Trout, 2005, and Alexander and Weinberg, 2007, for further discussion).

Developing the strategy of §3.3C above, Externalist theories of meaning (or “content”) try to meet at least part of Quine’s challenge by considering how matters of meaning need not rely on epistemic . or really any internal connections among thoughts or beliefs, in the way that many philosophers had traditionally supposed, but as involving largely causal and social relations between uses of words and the phenomena in the world that they pick out. This suggestion gradually emerged in the work of Putnam (1962 [1975], 1965 [1975] and 1975), Kripke (1972 [1980]) and Burge (1979, 1986), but it took the form of positive theories in, e.g., the work of Devitt (1981, 2015), Dretske (1988) and Fodor (1990b), who tried to base meaning in various actual or co-variational causal relations between states of the mind/brain and external phenomena (see Indicator Semantics ; as well as the work on “teleosemantics” of Millikan, 1984), Papineau, 1987, and Neander, 1995, 2017, who look to mechanisms of natural selection; see Teleological Theories of Mental Content ).

Consider, for example, Fodor’s proposal. Simplifying it slightly, Fodor (1990b) claimed that

a symbol S means p if (i) under some conditions, C, it’s a law that S is entokened iff p , and (ii) any other tokening of S synchronically depends upon (i), but not vice versa .

Thus, tokenings of “horse” mean horse because there are (say, optimal viewing) conditions under which tokenings of “horse” co-vary with horses, and tokenings of “horse” caused by cows asymmetrically depend upon that fact. The intuitive idea here is that what makes “horse” mean horse is that errors and other tokenings of “horse” in the absence of horses (e.g., dreaming of them) depend upon being able to get things right, but not vice versa : getting things right doesn’t depend upon getting them wrong. The law in (i), so to say, “governs” the tokenings of (ii). (Note that this condition is metaphysical , appealing to actual laws of entokenings, and not upon asymmetric dependencies between epistemic criteria suggested by Fodor in his defense of Putnam we discussed in §3.6.2.)

Fodor’s and related proposals are not without their problems (see Loewer, 1996, Rey, 2009 and Causal Theories of Mental Content ). Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that, were such theories to succeed in providing the kind of explanatorily adequate, non-circular account of intentionality to which they aspire, they would go some way towards saving at least intentional psychology from Quine’s attack, and provide at least one prima facie plausible, naturalistic strategy for distinguishing facts about meaning from facts about mere belief. The proposals, unlike those in the traditions of Carnap or of neo-Cartesians, have at least the form of a serious reply.

However, even if such externalist strategies, either Fodor’s or teleosemantic ones, were to save intentionality and meaning, they would do so only by forsaking the high hopes we noted in §2 philosophers harbored for the analytic. For externalists are typically committed to counting expressions as “synonymous” if they happen to be linked in the right way to the same external phenomena, even if a thinker couldn’t realize that they are by a priori (or, at any rate, “armchair”) reflection alone. By at least the Fregean substitution criterion (§1.2), they would seem to be committed to counting as “analytic” many patently empirical sentences as “Water is H2O,” “Salt is NaCl” or “Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens,” since in each of these cases, something may co-vary in the relevant way with tokenings of the expression on one side of the identity if and only if it co-varies with tokenings of the one on the other (similar problems and others arise for teleosemantics; see Fodor 1990b, pp. 72–73).

Of course, along the lines of the worldly turn we noted in §3.6.3, an externalist might cheerfully just allow that some sentences, e.g., “water is H20,” are in fact analytic, even though they are “external” and subject to empirical (dis)confirmation. Such a view would actually comport well with an older philosophical tradition less interested in the meanings of our words and concepts , and more interested in the “essences” of the worldly phenomena they pick out . Locke (1690 [1975], II, 31, vi), for example, posited “real” essences of things rather along the lines resuscitated by Putnam (1975) and Kripke (1972 [1980]), the real essences being the conditions in the world independent of our thought that make something the thing it is. Thus, being H2O may be what makes something water , and (to take the striking examples of diseases noted by Putnam, 1962 [1975]) being the activation of a certain virus is what makes something polio. But, of course, such an external view would still dash the hopes of philosophers looking to the analytic to explain a priori knowledge (but see Bealer 1987 and Jackson 1998 for strategies to assimilate such empirical cases to nevertheless a priori , armchair analysis). Such a consequence, however, might not faze an externalist like Fodor (1998), who is concerned only to save intentional psychology, and might otherwise share Quine’s scepticism about the analytic and the a priori .

Two final problems, however, loom over any such externalist strategies. One is how to provide content to “response-dependent” terms, such as “interesting,” “amusing,” “sexy,” “worrisome,” whose extensions vary greatly with users and occasions. What seems crucial to the contents of such terms is not any externalia that they might pick out, but simply some internal reactions of thinkers that might vary among them even under all conditions, but without difference in meaning. At any rate, there’s no reason to suppose there’s any sort of law that links the same phenomena to different people who find different things “interesting,” “funny,” or even “green” (cf. Russell, 1912; Hardin, 2008). The other problem is how to distinguish necessarily empty terms that purport to refer to (arguably) impossible phenomena such as perfectly flat surfaces, Euclidean figures, fictional characters or immortal souls. An externalist would seem to be committed to treating all such terms as synonymous, despite, of course, the fact that thoughts about them should obviously be distinguished (see Rey, 2009).

A promising strategy for replying to these latter problems, as well as to Quine’s challenge in a way that might even begin to provide what the neo-Cartesian wants, can be found in a proposal of Paul Horwich (1998, 2005). He emphasizes how the meaning properties of a term are the ones that play a “basic explanatory role” with regard to the use of a term generally, the ones ultimately in virtue of which a term is used with that meaning. For example, the use of “red” to refer to the color of blood, roses, stop signs, etc,. is arguably explained by its use to refer to certain apparent colors in good light, but not vice versa : the latter use is “basic” to all the other uses. Similarly, uses of “and” explanatorily depend upon its basic use in inferences to and from the sentences it conjoins, and number terms to items in a sequence respecting Peano’s axioms (Horwich, 1998:45,129; see also Devitt 1996, 2002 for a similar proposal).

Although by allowing for purely internal explanatory conditions, this strategy offers a way to deal with response-dependent and necessarily empty terms, and promises a way of distinguishing analyticities from mere beliefs, there are still several further potential problems it faces. The first is that merely appealing to a “basic explanatory” condition for the use of a word doesn’t distinguish misuses and metaphors from etymologies, derived idioms and “dead metaphors”: saying “Juliet is the sun” can be explained by the use of “sun” to refer to the sun, but so can “lobbying” be explained by the use of “lobby” for lobbies of buildings (where politicians often met), and “the eye of a needle” by the shape of an animal eye. In these latter cases, the words seem to be “frozen” or “dead” metaphors, taking on meanings of their own. While they are explained by original “basic” uses, they are no longer “governed” by them.

Here it may be worth combining something of the Horwich view with something of Fodor’s aforementioned cousin suggestion of the asymmetric counterfactual (§4.2), along lines suggested by Rey (2009; 2020a, §10.3): the new “dead” uses of an idiom or metaphor no longer asymmetrically depend upon the explanatorily basic use. “Eye of a needle” would still mean the hole at the end of a needle, even if “eye” no longer referred to animal eyes. But “eye” used to refer to, say, the drawing of an eye, would both asymmetrically and explanatorily depend upon its being used to refer to actual eyes. And describing a three-way correspondence as “triangular” may asymmetrically and explanatorily depend upon thinking of certain geometric figures as triangular, but not vice versa – despite the impossibility of there ever being any actual triangles in the external world (see Allott and Textor, 2022, for development of this suggestion). Taking the asymmetric dependency to be “internally” explanatory relieves it of the excessive externalism with which Fodor burdened it, while avoiding the etymologies and dead metaphors facing Horwich’s view on its own.

However, although such a proposal may offer a promising strategy for meeting Quine’s challenge about many ordinary terms, it isn’t clear it would work for highly theoretic ones. For if Quine (1953 [1980a]) is right about even a limited holism involved in the use of scientific terms, then there may be no sufficiently local basic facts on which all other uses of a term asymmetrically and explanatorily depend. To take the kind of case that most interested Quine, it certainly seems unlikely that there is some small set of uses of, say, “number,” “positron,” “space” or “biological species” that are explanatorily basic, on which all other uses really depend. Such terms often come with a large cluster of terms appearing in claims that come as, so to say, a loose “package deal,” and revision over time may touch any particular claim in the interests of overall explanatory adequacy. Uses of a term involved in the expression of belief, either in thought or talk, will likely be justified and explained by the same processes of holistic confirmation that led Quine to his scepticism about the analytic in the first place (cf. Gibbard, 2008). Of course, Quine might be wrong about taking the case of theoretic terms in science to be representative of terms in human psychology generally (cf. Chomsky, 2000, footnote 10 above), and the above proposal might be confined to some restricted portions of a speaker’s psychology, e.g., to perception (as in Fodor, 1983, 2000). But, to put it mildly, the verdict on these issues is not quite in (see supplement §§4–5).

Lastly, a third (and, for some, a serious) possible drawback of this strategy is that it still risks rendering matters of meaning far less “transparent” and introspectively accessible than philosophers have standardly supposed. There is little reason to suppose that what is asymmetrically-explanatorily basic about one’s use of a term in thought or talk is a matter that is available to introspection or armchair reflection. As in the case of “marriage” mentioned earlier, but certainly with respect to other philosophically problematic notions, just which properties, if any, are explanatorily basic may not be an issue that is at all easy to determine. What are the asymmetric-explanatorily basic uses of “freedom” or “soul”? Do even people’s uses of animal terms really depend upon dubbings of species – or of individual exemplars – or do they depend more upon an innate disposition to think in terms of underlying biological kinds (cf. Keil 2014, pp. 327–333)? Do their uses of number words and concepts really depend upon their grasp of Peano’s axioms? Perhaps the usage is grounded more in practices of (finite) counting, estimates and noticing merely finite one-to-one correspondences; or perhaps they lie in the general recursive character of language (cf. Hauser et al 2002). Again, one may need the resources of a psychology that delves into far more deeply into the complex, internal causal relations in the mind than are available at its introspective or behavioral surface.

4.4 Chomskyan Strategies

Such an interest in a deeper and richer internal psychology emerged most dramatically in the 1950s in the work of Noam Chomsky. In his (1957, 1965, 1968 [2006]) he began to revolutionize linguistics by presenting substantial evidence and arguments for the existence of an innate “generative” grammar in a special language faculty in people’s brains that he argued was responsible for their underlying competence to speak and understand natural languages. This opened up the possibility of a response to Quine’s (1960) scepticism about the analytic within his own naturalistic framework, simply freed of its odd behaviorism, which Chomsky and others had independently, empirically refuted (see Chomsky 1959, and Gleitman, Gross and Reisberg 2011, chapter 7). Some of it also dovetails nicely with ideas of Friedrich Waismann and the later Wittgenstein, as well as with important recent work on polysemy. But the program Chomsky initiated is complex, and its relation to the analytic quite controversial, and so discussion of it is relegated to the following supplement to this entry:

Supplement: Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics .

Suppose, per the discussion of at least §3 of the supplement , that linguistics were to succeed in delineating a class of analytic sentences grounded in the constraints of a special language faculty in the way that some Chomskyans sometimes seem to suggest. Would such sentences serve the purposes for which we noted earlier (§2) philosophers had enlisted them? Perhaps some of them would. An empirical grounding of the analytic might provide us with an understanding of what constitutes a person’s competence with specific words and concepts, particularly logical or mathematical ones. Given that Quinean scepticism about the analytic is a source of his scepticism about the determinacy of cognitive states (see §3.5 above), such a grounding may be crucial for a realistic psychology, determining the conditions under which someone has a thought with a specific content.

Moreover, setting out the constitutive conditions for possessing a concept might be of some interest to philosophers generally, since many of the crucial questions they ask concern the proper understanding of ordinary notions such as material object, person, action, freedom, god, the good , or the beautiful . Suppose, further, that a domain, such as perhaps ethics or aesthetics, is “response dependent,” constituted by the underlying rules of our words and concepts; suppose, that is, that these rules constitute the nature of, say, the good, the funny , or the beautiful . If so, then it might not be implausible to claim that successful conceptual analysis could provide us with some a priori knowledge of such domains (although, again, sorting out the rules may require empirical linguistic and psychological theories not available to “armchair reflection”).

But, of course, many philosophers have wanted more than these essentially psychological gains. They have hoped that analytic claims might provide a basis for a priori knowledge of domains that exist independently of us and are not exhausted by our concepts. An important case in point would seem to be the very case of arithmetic that motivated much of the discussion of the analytic in the first place. Recent work of Crispin Wright (1983) and others on the logicist program has shown how a version of Frege’s program might be rescued by appealing not to his problematic Basic Law V, but instead merely to what is called “Hume’s Principle,” or the claim that for the number of Fs to be equal to the number of Gs is for there to be a “one-to-one correspondence” between the Fs and the Gs (as in the case of the fingers of a normal right and left hand), even in infinite cases. According to what is now regarded as “Frege’s Theorem,” the Peano axioms for arithmetic can be derived from this principle in standard second-order logic (see Frege’s theorem and foundations for arithmetic ).

Now, Wright has urged that Hume’s Principle might be regarded as analytic, and perhaps this claim could be sustained by an examination of the language faculty along the lines of a Chomskyan linguistics set out in the supplement. If so, then wouldn’t that vindicate the suggestion that arithmetic can be known a priori ? Not obviously, since Hume’s Principle is a claim not merely about the concepts F and G, but about the presumably concept-independent fact about the number of things that are F and the number of things that are G, and, we can ask, what justifies any claim about them? As George Boolos (1997) asked in response to Wright:

If numbers are supposed to be identical if and only if the concepts they are numbers of are equinumerous, what guarantee do we have that every concept has a number? (p. 253)

Indeed, as Edward Zalta (2013) observes,

The basic problem for Frege’s strategy, however, is that for his logicist project to succeed, his system must at some point include (either as an axiom or theorem) statements that explicitly assert the existence of certain kinds of abstract entities and it is not obvious how to justify the claim that we know such explicit existential statements. (2013, Section 6.2)

The concept of a unique successor to every number might be a defining feature of the lexical item, “number,” but that doesn’t itself imply that an infinity of numbers actually exists . Meanings and concepts are one thing; reality quite another. Justification of such existential statements and, with them, Hume’s Principle would seem to have to involve something more than appealing to merely the concept, but also —to recall Quine’s (CLT, p. 121, §3.3 above) claim— to “the elegance and convenience which the hypothesis brings to the containing bodies of laws and data,” i.e., to our best overall empirical theory of the world, irrespective of what constraints language might impose (see Wright, 1999, and Horwich, 2000, for further discussion).

The problem here becomes even more obvious in non-mathematical cases. For example, philosophers have wanted to claim not merely that our concepts of red and green exclude the possibility of our thinking that something is both colors all over, but that this possibility is ruled out for the actual colors, red and green , themselves (if such there be). It is therefore no accident that Bonjour’s (1998, pp. 184–5) defense of a priori knowledge turns on resuscitating views of Aristotle and Aquinas, according to which the very properties of red and green themselves are constituents of the propositions we grasp. But it is just such a wonderful coincidence between merely our concepts and actual worldly properties that a linguistic semantics alone obviously cannot ensure.

But suppose, nevertheless, there did in fact exist a correspondence between our concepts and the world, indeed, a deeply reliable, counterfactual-supporting correspondence whereby it was in fact metaphysically impossible for certain claims constitutive of those concepts not to be true. This is, of course, not implausible in the case of logic and arithmetic, and is entirely compatible with, e.g., Boolos’ reasonable doubts about them (after all, it’s always possible to doubt what is in fact a necessary truth). Such necessary correspondences between thought and the world might then serve as a basis for claims to a priori knowledge in at least a reliabilist epistemology, where what’s important is not believers’ abilities to justify their claims, but merely the reliability of the processes by which they arrive at them (see Reliabilist Epistemology ). Indeed, in the case of logic and arithmetic, the beliefs might be arrived at by steps that were not only necessarily reliable , but might also be taken to be so by believers, in ways that might in fact depend in no way upon experience, but only on their competence with the relevant words and concepts (Kitcher 1980; Rey 1998; and Goldman 1999 explore this strategy).

Such a reliabilist approach, though, might be less than fully satisfying to someone interested in the traditional analytic a priori . For, although someone might turn out in fact to have analytic a priori knowledge of this sort, she might not know that she does (reliabilist epistemologists standardly forgo the “KK Principle,” according to which if one knows that p, one knows that one knows that p). Knowledge that the relevant claims were knowable a priori might itself be only possible by an empirically informed understanding of one’s language faculty and other cognitive capacities à la Chomsky, and by its consonance with the rest of one’s theory of the world, à la Quine. One would only know a posteriori that something was knowable a priori .

The trouble then is that claims that people do have a capacity for a priori knowledge seem quite precarious. As we noted earlier ( footnote 7 ), people are often unreliable at appreciating deductively valid arguments; and appreciating the standard rules even of natural deduction is for many people often a difficult intellectual achievement. Consequently, people’s general competence with logical notions may not in fact consist in any grip on valid logical rules; and so whatever rules do underlie that competence may well turn out not to be the kind of absolutely reliable guide to the world on which the above reliabilist defense of a priori analytic knowledge seems to depend. In any case, in view merely of the serious possibility that these pessimistic conclusions are true, it’s hard to see how any appeal to the analytic to establish the truth of any controversial claim in any mind-independent domain could have any special justificatory force without a sufficiently detailed, empirical psychological theory to back it up.

Moreover, even if we did have a true account of our minds and the semantic rules afforded by our linguistic and conceptual competence, it’s not clear it would really serve the “armchair” purposes of traditional philosophy that we mentioned at the outset (§1). Consider, for example, the common puzzle about the possibility that computers might actually think and enjoy a mental life. In response to this puzzle some philosophers, e.g, Wittgenstein (1953 [1967], §§111, 281), Ziff, 1959, and Hacker, 1990, have suggested that it’s analytic that a thinking thing must be alive , a suggestion that certainly seems to accord with many folk intuitions (many people who might cheerfully accept a computational explanation of a thought process often balk at the suggestion that an inanimate machine engaging in that computation would actually be thinking). Now, as we noted in the supplement , §2, Chomsky (2000, p. 44) explicitly endorses this suggestion. So suppose then this claim were in fact sustained by linguistic theory, showing that the lexical item “think” is, indeed, constrained by the feature [+animate], and so is not felicitously applied to artifactual computers. Should this really satisfy the person worried about the possibility of artificial thought?

It’s hard to see why. For the serious question that concerns people worried about whether artifacts could think concerns whether those artifacts could in fact share the genuine, theoretically interesting, explanatory properties of a thinking thing (cf. Jackson 1998, pp. 34–5). We might have no empirical, scientific reason to suppose that genuine, biological animacy (n.b., not merely the perhaps purely syntactic, linguistic feature [+animate]!; see supplement §2) actually figures among them. And so we might conclude that, despite these supposed constraints of natural language, inanimate computers could come to “think” after all. Indeed, perhaps, the claim that thinking things must be alive is an example of a claim that is analytic but false , rather as the belief that cats are animals would be, should it turn that the things are actually robots from Mars; and so we should pursue the option of polysemy and “open texture” that Chomsky also endorses, and proceed to allow that artifacts could think.

Of course, a speaker could choose not to go along with, so to say, opening the texture this far. But if the explanatory point were nevertheless correct, other speakers could of course simply proceed to define a new word “think*” that lacks the animacy constraint and applies to the explanatory kind that in fact turns out to include, equally, humans and appropriately programmed artifacts. The issue would reduce to merely a verbal quibble: so computers don’t “think”; they “think*” instead. Indeed, it’s a peculiar feature of the entire discussion of the analytic that it can seem to turn on what may in the end be mere verbal quibbles. Perhaps the “linguist turn” of philosophy that we sketched in §§1.2–3.3 led into a blind alley, and it would be more fruitful to explore, so far as possible, conceptual and/or explanatory connections that may exist in our minds or or in the world to a large extent independently of language.

In any case, while the semantic conditions of a language might provide a basis for securing a priori knowledge of claims about mind- dependent domains, such as those of perhaps ethics and aesthetics, in the case of mind- independent domains, such as logic and mathematics, or the nature of worldly phenomena such as life or thought, the prospects seem more problematic. There may be analytic claims to be had here, but at least in these cases they would, in the immortal words of Putnam (1965 [1975], p. 36), “cut no philosophical ice…bake no philosophical bread and wash no philosophical windows.” [ 18 ] We would just have to be satisfied with theorizing about the mind-independent domains themselves, without being able to justify our claims about them by appeal to the meanings of our words alone. Reflecting on the difficulties of the past century’s efforts on behalf of the analytic, it’s not clear why anyone would really want to insist otherwise.

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Logic in analytic philosophy: a quantitative analysis

• Published: 18 July 2020
• Volume 198 , pages 10991–11028, ( 2021 )

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• Guido Bonino 1 ,
• Paolo Maffezioli 2 &
• Paolo Tripodi 1  

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Using quantitative methods, we investigate the role of logic in analytic philosophy from 1941 to 2010. In particular, a corpus of five journals publishing analytic philosophy is assessed and evaluated against three main criteria: the presence of logic, its role and level of technical sophistication. The analysis reveals that (1) logic is not present at all in nearly three-quarters of the corpus, (2) the instrumental role of logic prevails over the non-instrumental ones, and (3) the level of technical sophistication increases in time, although it remains relatively low. These results are used to challenge the view, widespread among analytic philosophers and labeled here “prevailing view”, that logic is a widely used and highly sophisticated method to analyze philosophical problems.

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How (not) to integrate scientific and moral realism

What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good?

Critical Theory: Epistemological Content and Method

By “early,” “middle” and “late” we mean the origins of analytic philosophy, the period from the mid-30s to the mid-70s, and the last forty years, respectively. The expression “late analytic philosophy” was introduced in Weatherson ( 2014 ) and analyzed in Bonino and Tripodi ( 2018 ).

The interview was given in 1994 and was first published in Edmister and O’Shea ( 1994 ).

For a comprehensive survey of logical methods in philosophy, see Pettigrew and Horsten ( 2011 ).

This was the title of a series of conferences organized at the University of Turin since January 2017: see https://dr2blog.hcommons.org .

Notice that by ‘representative’ we do not mean that each and every article in the corpus is an analytic philosophy article, but only that the corpus consists mainly, though not exclusively of articles in analytic philosophy.

In a recent interview Moretti clarifies: “The term ‘digital humanities’ means nothing. Computational criticism has more meaning, but now we all use the term ‘digital humanities’—me included. I would say that DH occupies about 50 percent of my work” (Moretti 2016 ).

This kind of distant reading is applied, for example, in Moretti ( 2009 ) to literary corpora and in Bonino and Tripodi ( 2019 ) to philosophical corpora.

Arguably, also Petrovich ( 2018 ) belongs to this line of research.

For the original quotation see Wittgenstein ( 1953 ).

Available at https://philindex.org .

Notice, however, that the 4284 articles contain some duplicates, that is articles shared by the purposive sample (2553) and the dataset drawn from the Philosopher’s Index (1622). Thus, we cannot say that we read exactly 4284.

The analysis revealed that the Philosopher’s Index classification is actually biased in that, for instance, it tends to exclude articles in which logic plays only an instrumental role.

All this means that, with the exception of the total number of articles, all the results concerning the subdivisions of articles in groups such as logic, instrumental, logical sophistication, and so forth are estimated values, obtained in the following way: \(n = a + 5b\) , where n is the estimated value for group X, a is the number of articles belonging to X in the Philosopher’s Index dataset, and b is the number of articles belonging to X recognized in the purposive sample but not present in the Philosopher’s Index dataset. Obviously, b is multiplied by 5 because the sample amounts to the 20% of the entire corpus.

The second clause of M3 is based on the consideration that the qualification “highly sophisticated” must be assessed relative to the overall development of logic as a discipline: since logic arguably becomes more sophisticated over time, the level of sophistication required in order to be considered high should also raise over time. Therefore, if analytic philosophy is to be regarded as highly sophisticated from a logical perspective, one should expect that the level of sophistication of the logic that is present in analytic philosophy also increases over time.

In very few cases, when we did not reach a clear and shared conclusion, we left the decision open. For example, if we were hesitant as to whether consider a given paper belonged to the philosophy of language or the philosophy of logic, we assigned the value 0.5 to each of the alternatives, rather than the value 1 to one of them.

The interested reader is referred to http://openlogicproject.org/ .

One may wonder why \(\mathsf {FOL}\) and \(\mathsf {NCL}\) are treated as equally sophisticated to begin with. The main reason is that none presupposes the other—although both presuppose \(\mathsf {PL}\) . One can, for instance, approach the study of first-order logic without knowing anything about modal (propositional) logic; viceversa , one can study modal (propositional) logic independently from first-order logic.

To be sure, it would have been possible to evaluate the fulfillment of M1 by making reference to the purposive sample alone. Yet we chose to make the calculations on the basis of the combinations of the two datasets (i.e. purposive sample and Philosopher’s Index dataset) in order to preserve as much uniformity as possible in our data. Luckily enough, the difference between the two calculations is just 0.98%, which—by the way—seems to confirm that the 20% purposive sample is statistically rather reliable.

Notice that Archive for Mathematical Logic and Mathematical Logic Quarterly are successors of Archiv für mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung and Zeitschrift für mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik , respectively, and were published since the 1950s. The articles, however, were mainly in German.

Conditions (1), (2) and (3) above, which provide a more through explanation of the idea of instrumentality expressed in M2, must not be confused with the annotation rules. In fact, they would not be operational enough. We are confident that our annotation rules are able to select a class of articles that is approximately equivalent to the class which would be ideally selected by (1), (2) and (3).

This example allows us to clarify a subtle point concerning our distant reading methodology. One could argue that von Wright conceived of (deontic) logic as an instrument of philosophy, an instrument that provides a Carnapian explication of (deontic) concepts. One could try to defend this claim, for example, by pointing out that although von Wright became a pupil of Wittgenstein, he never ceased to be heavily influenced by the Carnapian ideas he received as a young man in Finland by his former teacher, Eino Kaila (von Wright 1989 ). In the present article we chose to focus mainly on the paper under consideration, without necessarily considering any further, external information (however interesting and correct it may be). Rather, we closely adhered to the annotation rules. Therefore, von Wright’s article has been attributed to the logic proper category.

Things are somewhat different in Britain, but we will not be concerned with these subtler differences here.

One may think that the idea of taking the decrease of the lowest level of logical sophistication as an evidence of the emergence of analytic philosophy presupposes the prevailing view. In particular, it presupposes M3. And since we use the decrease of level \(\mathsf {0}\) to assess the prevailing view, one may object that there is a circularity in our analysis. To address this issue it should be noted that behind the idea that a decrease of level \(\mathsf {0}\) can explain the emergence of analytic philosophy there is the assumption, largely independent of the prevailing view, that the logic of Dewey, Bradley or Hegel is not the kind of logic that analytic philosophers are normally interested in; most of them would not even count this as logic. If so, when we find an article discussing the logic of Dewey, Bradley or Hegel, it is reasonable to assume that in most cases its author is not an analytic philosopher. Now, the assumption that analytic philosophers are not interested in non-mathematical logic is perhaps implied by the prevailing view, but it certainly does not imply it. Therefore, our analysis does not presupposes the prevailing view for the simple reason that the prevailing view is a view about the role of logic in analytic philosophy and the articles at level \(\mathsf {0}\) that disappeared were not arguably written by analytic philosophers.

A full-text search on JSTOR reveals that “Dewey” occurs in 305 articles published in The Journal of Philosophy from 1941 to 1960, and in 140 articles from 1961 to 2010, whereas in The Philosophical Review it has 89 occurrences in the former period and only 9 occurrences in the latter period. Notice that for The Journal of Philosophy 305 occurrences of “Dewey” in the period 1941–1960 is a significant result, compared to the occurrences of “Russell” (199), “Whitehead” (155), “Carnap” (95) and “Wittgenstein” (66).

See also Katzav ( 2018 ).

One of the obstacles to a straightforward answer to this question is that “a little” is a relative notion. One could devise methods to establish some standards, considering for example the presence of logic in a corpus of French or German journals. Should these additional data reveal that logic is present in, say, 10% of the corpus, it would be fair to conclude that the prevailing view is, in a certain sense, confirmed. Unfortunately, at the moment we are not able to give even a rough estimation of how much logic is present in other corpora and we leave this task to future work.

There are, of course, differences among the founding fathers. It is worth noting, incidentally, that Russell (in a more elementary way) and Carnap (in a more sophisticated way) had somewhat innovative positions, since they anticipated the view of mathematical logic as a fundamental instrument for philosophy. The case of Carnap is particularly interesting: in the 1950s, he used logic as an instrument in his confirmation theory (Carnap 1950 ) and he also provided an attempt to axiomatize biology for philosophical purposes (Carnap 1954 ), based on the work previously done by Joseph Henry Woodger (Woodger ( 1937 ), which in turn had been deeply influenced by Carnap and Tarski’s writings). Carnap famously called such an instrumental role of logic “explication”.

Interestingly enough, a logician such as von Wright, who belonged to a different generation, would have on the contrary been surprised by this data, since he had conjectured a different trend: “I shall not predict—he wrote—what will be the leading trends in the philosophy of the first century of the 2000s. But I think that they will be markedly different from what they have been in this century, and that logic will not be one of them. If I am right, the twentieth century will even clearer than now stand out as another Golden Age of Logic in the history of those protean forms of human spirituality we call Philosophy” (von Wright 1993b , p. 23).

However, Williamson might consider the rise of quantified modal logic a confirmation of his point of view, rather than an alternative account. According to him, the development of modal logic as metaphysics is one of the most distinctive features of scientific and professional analytic philosophy in the recent years (Williamson 2007 , 2013 ).

Here are the results with respect to the entire corpus, namely, \(\mathsf {LOG}\) plus non-logical articles (level \(\mathsf {2}\) : 1.90% in the 1940s; 3.31% in the 1950s; 4.41% in the 1960s; 6.43 % in the 1970s; 4.23% in the 1980s; 3.85% in the 1990s; 3.26% in the 2000s. Level \(\mathsf {3}\) : 1.14% in the 1940s; 3.36% in the 1950s; 5.48% in the 1960s; 7.94% in the 1970s; 5.61% in the 1980s; 4.85% in the 1990s; 5.53% in the 2000s).

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1.1 The level of sophistication of \(\mathsf {Other}\)

\(\mathsf {Other}\) at level \(\mathsf {0}\) and \(\mathsf {1}\)

\(\mathsf {Other}\) at level \(\mathsf {2}\) and \(\mathsf {3}\) .

\(\mathsf {Other}\) at level \(\mathsf {4}\) .

1.2 The level of sophistication of \(\mathsf {Discipl}\)

\(\mathsf {Discipl}\) at level \(\mathsf {0}\) and \(\mathsf {1}\) .

\(\mathsf {Discipl}\) at level \(\mathsf {2}\) and \(\mathsf {3}\) .

\(\mathsf {Discipl}\) at level \(\mathsf {4}\) .

1.3 The level of sophistication of \(\mathsf {Instr}\)

\(\mathsf {Instr}\) at level \(\mathsf {0}\) and \(\mathsf {1}\) .

\(\mathsf {Instr}\) at level \(\mathsf {2}\) and \(\mathsf {3}\) .

\(\mathsf {Instr}\) at level \(\mathsf {4}\) .

1.4 Sub-disciplines in which logic is an instrument

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Bonino, G., Maffezioli, P. & Tripodi, P. Logic in analytic philosophy: a quantitative analysis. Synthese 198 , 10991–11028 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02770-5

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Accepted : 27 June 2020

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Issue Date : November 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02770-5

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A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy

Prado, C. G. (ed.), A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy , Humanity Books, 2003, 329pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 1591021057

Reviewed by Samuel Wheeler, University of Connecticut

This collection of eleven essays, subtitled “comparing analytic and continental philosophy,” is a mixture of good essays and essays that are so irritating that their merits may be masked. The best essays discuss particular pairs of thinkers in a knowledgeable, fair, and interesting way. Some other essays are a reminder that the contempt that many analytic philosophers bear to continental philosophy is returned.

The essays that discuss “analytic” and “continental” in general terms by and large strongly favor “continental.” They also regard analytic philosophy as having ended sometime well before 1970. Much is made of analytic philosophy’s disdain for metaphysics, for instance. Kripke appears in the index just twice, once as a Wittgenstein scholar and once mentioned in passing by Rorty. The remarkable turn to pre-critical, pre-Kantian metaphysical speculation that now flourishes among “analytic” philosophers is not mentioned.

A difficulty with some of the “general” essays is that “analytic philosophy” is a loose term without identifiable doctrines, given that Brandom, Kripke, Kaplan, Chisholm, Davidson, Carnap, Austin, Hempel, and Wittgenstein fall under its extension. Such a vague family resemblance target is difficult to attack on the basis of particular traits. So some of our authors declare various theses to be part of the “analytic tradition” without much argument or, as far as I can see, warrant.

Since the essays are quite diverse, I will discuss them in the order of their appearance:

1) Richard Rorty’s contribution, “Analytic and Conversational Philosophy,” continues Rorty’s characterization of philosophy as a contingent cultural practice rather than an enquiry at the core of humanity’s telos. Not surprisingly, he regards the division into “analytic” and “continental” philosophy as largely institutional. Graduate students need to prepare themselves for the job market, crossing lines by reading material that will not further this end reduces the probability of getting a job. Thus most members of the profession never read analytic or “continental” texts until after tenure, if ever.

The division Rorty sees is between the dominant “analytic” conception of philosophy as a kind of conceptual handmaiden to science, “getting things right,” and the dominant “continental” conception of philosophy as cultural critique. The first is what Rorty sees as the main conception analytic philosophers hold of philosophy; the second is how continental philosophers view the subject. Rorty proposes the terms “analytic” and “conversational” philosophy, which sorts individuals slightly differently.

Rorty has a pessimistic view about the present and future of analytic philosophy. “Getting something right” presupposes something that is constant and stable. Crudely and briefly, his argument is this: If concepts, as Quine, Davidson, and Wittgenstein have argued, change with change of cultures, then there is no permanent “getting things right” in conceptual analysis. So, arcane discussions of the subtleties of conditionals or causality, for instance, are not working out the details of the infrastructure of science but are rather descriptions of very minor parts of the current contingent practices. Rorty therefore doubts that there are “natural explananda,”(p.23) i.e. philosophical problems, that are dealt with at various times by Plato and Dretske or by Aristotle and van Inwagen.

This is a puzzling argument, given Rorty’s general agreement with Davidson. If we can understand Plato, then, even though no ancient Greek term has quite the place in Plato’s thought that any modern English term has in ours, we can “think the same thing” as Plato thought, in the same way that we can say what Galileo said. For a Davidsonian, to suppose that common problems, formulated in sentences that “say the same thing,” require some strict identity of “things thought” is a mistake that presupposes exactly what Rorty is attacking, namely timeless propositions. Communication does not require trans-linguistic meanings. Rorty’s idea that, for instance, Plato is complaining about some entirely different problem in Athenian politics than modern Americans are complaining about in American politics seems to over-state differences. Where the line would be between the arcane peculiarities of a single culture’s concepts at a time and the topics about which we can communicate might be obscure. But “philosophical problems” do seem to transcend particular cultural locations.

Rorty’s remarks about the tenure-driven institutional state of “analytic philosophy” are well taken. Given the accuracy of Rorty’s general conception of “philosophy” as a literary practice, the narrowing that is taking place as literatures grow and young philosophers perforce read only within their narrow specialty, the intertextuality required for there to be a single field vanishes.

2) Barry Allen’s essay, “Carnap’s Contexts: Comte, Carnap and Heidegger” is wide-ranging. It begins by arguing that Carnap, as a logical positivist, should be understood “in the context” of Comte, a positivist tout court. It then launches into a discussion of Carnap versus Heidegger, heavily favoring Heidegger. Then there is a discussion of Carnap versus Nietzsche, again heavily favoring Nietzsche by assigning various derogatory Nietzschean epithets to Carnap (and to other “positivists”.)

The essay is a mix of interesting and insightful discussions, nasty digs at Carnap et al, and mystifying remarks. For instance, in discussing the role of logic in early analytic philosophy, Allen says that the logician’s distinction between “is” as identity, as existential quantification and as predication “…does not exist apart from the demand for a translation into the new logic.” Some remarks on why it is irrelevant that paradoxes (Socrates is red, red is a color, Socrates is a color) vanish on the new theory of truth-conditions are in order.

Carnap is placed in the tradition of philosophers who have denounced “philosophy.” Allen does not mention that this tradition goes back to Descartes, at least. In effect, Allen argues that Heidegger and Nietzsche offer deeper and more penetrating critiques of philosophy than the pale “positivism” that Quine, himself a positivist, deconstructs. “Positivism,” the focus of much of the essay, becomes such a broad term that (p.53) “Plato may have been the first positivist…” “Positivism” seems to refer to an urge for systematicity and “order” in accounts of what is. One wonders whether Husserl and Aquinas are positivists, according to Allen.

The overall impression of this essay is that it is revenge for Carnap’s admittedly ill-advised and mistaken critique of Heidegger. But attacking Carnap for character-flaws (assuming Nietzsche’s valuations) is puzzling in the context of a defense of Heidegger. A writer with less spleen could recognize that Carnap’s clueless polemics are no more relevant to Carnap’s work than silly Futurist manifestos are relevant to the value and interest of Futurist paintings.

3) Babette Babich’s “On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy/ Nietzsche’s Lying Truth, Heidegger’s Speaking Language, and Philosophy,” consists largely of assertions about analytic philosophy and citations of other people’s assertions. A reader somewhat familiar with both traditions will be puzzled as to why some of these assertions are taken to be true. One is surprised to find, among the claims of the “Twenty-two paragraphs against analysis” that “For analytic philosophy, all of metaphysics together with the traditional problems of philosophy, is, as an accomplished and desired deed…, already at an end and by definition (as meaningless and unverifiable.)” This is accompanied by a footnote saying that it is not true of all analytic philosophers, but that analytic metaphysics “is not robust.”

Near the end of the essay, Babich directs attention to the expected claim that “analytic philosophy is not like that any more.” In a baffling paragraph, Nagel’s “What It Is Like to Be a Bat” and Lewis’ “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se” are discussed or ignored. The discussion of the Lewis article ends with the observation that, “…for analysts, propositions are technical devices, having, as sentences do not always have, logical objects.”

This section is followed by a discussion of the “annexation” of continental philosophy by analytic philosophers, which consists in analytical philosophers getting interested in people like, for instance, Nietzsche. Their annexation, according to Babich, gets Nietzsche wrong, because of their analytic background. (It turns out that even many continental philosophers read Nietzsche in the wrong way.) The puzzling aspect of this complaint is the thesis that there is a single way of getting Nietzsche right. If philosophy is an intertextual literary practice, then one would expect that those with different backgrounds of texts would have different “readings” of a given text or group of texts. Wrong readings would presumably be readings that were unilluminating or uninteresting. But a claim that the analytic annexers are getting Nietzsche wrong would need to have more support than just the claim that the author’s take on Nietzsche is right, since other takes on Nietzsche may well also be right. There are many things that are true of Nietzsche, and some of those things may be illuminated by reading him in the light of analytic background texts. Presumably, Nietzsche’s intentions did not involve the relation to the hundred and some years of texts that intervened on either the “analytic” or “continental” side.

4) David Cerbone’s “Phenomenology: Straight and Hetero” is a comparison of Husserl and Dennett on the deliverances of consciousness. It proceeds by sketching Dennett’s third person approach to introspection, and frames the Husserlian reply by discussing Husserl’s replies to contemporary skeptics of introspection.

The exposition of Dennett’s views and Dennett’s reasons for suspicion of the “first-person” point of view about introspection is admirable and accurate. The next section asks what Dennett’s target has to do with Husserl. The answer is, “very little.” Husserl’s phenomenology is not introspection as conceived by Dennett or by Husserl’s contemporary critics. Cerbone’s exposition of Husserl is careful and clear. Essentially, Husserl has a very different project from the project Dennett criticizes.

Whether or not Dennett took himself to be giving a serious critique of Husserl, which seems unlikely, Cerbone’s essay may prevent some analytic philosophers from dismissing Husserl.

5) Clough and Kaplan’s “Davidson and Wittgenstein on Knowledge, Communication, and Social Justice” is a puzzling essay. The project is to explain how the insights of Wittgenstein and Davidson can resolve the following difficulty for feminist social-justice theorists: They wish to say that all knowledge-claims are relative to a culture while speaking from within an oppressive culture and criticizing that culture by invoking objectively true normative knowledge claims. Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s “non-foundationalism”s are to give the answer. Although “foundationalism” is not characterized in detail, I take it that it is the thesis that knowledge begins with unconceptualized data that are processed in determinate ways to yield propositions that are known. Relativism would then be the thesis that there are alternative processings.

On this understanding, Davidson is clearly an antifoundationalist. On Davidson’s view, neither relativism nor “realism” are coherent views, since both presuppose a given that can be divided up either arbitrarily or according to its intrinsic nature. But a Davidsonian antifoundationalism is prima facie independent of claims that knowledge is tainted by power relations or socially constructed. While I can imagine an interesting argument from Davidsonian theses that would arrive at some conclusions agreeable to feminism, I am not a subtle enough reader to see them in this text.

In Wittgenstein’s case, the discussion largely concerns his Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough . To be sure, the explanations Frazer gives are partial at best. But between the “noble savage” interpretation of Wittgenstein and the benighted experimentalist interpretation of Frazer there seems little to choose. Wittgenstein seems to hold that the drummers are not trying to make it rain, while Frazer treats them as quite dense. It is puzzling that the application of this discussion apparently appeals to true human nature. Clough and Kaplan say, “Wittgenstein is here asking us to acknowledge, and indeed embrace, parts of ourselves that our current form of life denigrates.” Alternative forms of life are “by their nature, far more impressive… than reasons could be.” A bit of explanation of how this comports with feminism and the historical are in order.

After a discussion of the feminist difficulties with maintaining relativism in the face of science’s pragmatic success, Clough and Kaplan conclude that Davidson and Wittgenstein can solve the feminist problem above. Their conclusion, although they seem not to want to say it, is that the “feminist dilemma” they started with is a pseudo-problem from the perspective of Wittgenstein and Davidson.

6) Richard Matthews’ “Heidegger and Quine on the (Ir)relevance of Logic for Philosophy” discusses some nice parallels between Quine’s take on logic and Heidegger’s. Neither takes logic to be absolutely special, for instance. Quine treats logical truths as very high-level generalizations; Heidegger treats logic as useful for mere science.

Some of the other parallels Matthews draws are less convincing. Quine’s “background theory” or “background language” arguably has a different role from Heidegger’s background, being the metalanguage in which the object language is described, and itself admitting of being an object language for another metalanguage. However, at a deeper level, there is a correspondence between Quine’s idea that any thought is language-like and Heidegger’s idea that beliefs and positings presuppose other positings, not all of which can be made explicit at once. So Quine’s idea that giving what we really mean is just regress to a background language does have something to do with Heidegger’s anti-Husserlian position on the possibility of making our thoughts explicit.

7) C.G. Prado’s “Correspondence, Construction and Realism, The Case of Searle and Foucault” is a discussion of correspondence versus “constructivist” conceptions of truth, arguing that Foucault’s conception of truth is closer to Davidson’s and Sellars’ than Searle’s is. This is a very daunting task, since even interpreting Searle’s, Davidson’s, and Foucault’s views in anything like the same metric is challenging.

Prado’s method is an exposition of Searle’s realism and an attempt to explain Foucault’s views of power and what Prado distinguishes as five distinct uses of “truth.” I’m not sure how much a reader not already familiar with Foucault would gather from any short exposition of Foucault’s notion of power. Prado agrees with criticisms of some of Foucault’s uses of “truth,” but argues that Foucault’s purified view is one that can be usefully compared with those of Searle and Davidson.

The argument is then, very roughly, that important features of Foucault’s conception of truth correspond to Davidson’s self-described “Coherence Theory of Truth.” Roughly, truth is a matter of internal relations among beliefs, not a matter of fitting the world. The difficulty with the argument is that Davidson, while not retracting any theses in the essay, regretted the title, “A Coherence Theory of Truth”, as encouraging exactly the kind of misunderstanding of his view that Prado endorses. Truth for Davidson is a primitive notion that cannot be defined in other terms (see his Journal of Philosophy articles). Davidson is neither a coherence theorist nor a correspondence theorist. Of course only a belief can be evidence for another belief, but it does not follow that truth is a systematization of what we believe.

So is Davidson akin to Foucault in some respects or not? Prado’s discussion, as so many discussions of the nature of truth, takes place at a level of abstraction that makes it difficult to know what one thinks about the issues. Perhaps a better way to proceed would have been to focus on particular discussions by Foucault. A question such as “Was Callicles homosexual” would bring out the sense in which, for Davidson, there are no conceptual schemes, but there are conceptual differences that raise problems about truth-values.

I think that, at some deep level, Prado is right that Foucault and Davidson are useful mutual supplements. It would be a complex but great project to supplement Davidson’s austere account of interpretation with the marvelous and persuasive discussions Foucault has given or to add a Davidsonian structure to Foucault’s insights into the cultural conditions of thought.

8) Ramberg’s “Illuminating Language: Interpretation and Understanding in Gadamer and Davidson” is a subtle and perceptive discussion of the extent to which Davidson and Gadamer can be usefully compared. Very briefly, Gadamer phenomenological and “ontological” questions turn out to have little immediately to do with Davidson’s account of how agents in a world constitute themselves as agents by triangulation. Both accounts of interpretation are at a distance from actual interpretative practice, but distanced in different respects. Davidson constructs a theoretical account of how language, thought, and intentionality could arise from organisms in an environment, while Gadamer constructs an account of how limited, historically conditioned humans can get anything close to right.

I think Ramberg over-states the extent to which Davidson’s account is distanced from actual interpretations. Davidson’s account is abstract, but illuminates in the way that game theory illuminates. We can see the structures Davidson formalizes in social interactions. In relation to Gadamer, though, it is clear that Davidson is on a different page. What exactly would Davidson make of Gadamer’s conception of truth? How does it interfere with a person knowing that there have been dogs that that person is finite and historically situated? Gadamer’s “truth” is Truth, approached via human experience and language.

Ramberg suggests that there is some hope for achieving a philosophical perspective from which the work of Gadamer and Davidson can be both taken into account. I’m not sure what this perspective would be. Here is a simple-minded conjecture: A Davidsonian feels a bit of unease about a sentence like “Water is an element,” or “Callicles was homosexual.” Are they true or false? Philosophers of science, on the one hand, and Foucault, on the other, make such questions problematic. The very terms presuppose a background that we don’t share. We want to say that the whole conception, the theory and practices involved in these words, is dubious. But the sentences ought to be either true or false. Perhaps Truth can enter a Davidsonian’s thinking along with truth by focusing on cases where historicity and finiteness makes “`Fred is a frog’ is true if and only if Fred is a frog” somehow inadequate.

Ramberg’s essay is well worth Xeroxing.

9) Mike Sandbothe’s “Davidson and Rorty on Truth: Reshaping Analytic Philosophy for a Transcontinental Conversation” is a perceptive and detailed “narrative” of the long interchange between Davidson and Rorty on the role, if any, of truth in philosophy and semantics. The narrative itself is a useful map for anyone trying to keep track of the concessions and eventual remaining disagreements of this discussion.

The “narrative” does much more than that. It yields an enlightening meta-philosophical discussion of analytic and continental philosophy and provides a nice contrast with the combat stance of some of the other essays in this volume

Sandbothe’s purpose is to illustrate two different conceptions of what philosophy should be. Rorty’s view, that philosophy should be therapy, getting people not to take even therapeutic systematic philosophical projects seriously, is part of an analytic tradition that includes the later Wittgenstein and sometimes Austin. The other analytic tradition (Quine, Carnap) therapizes by systematic formalism. Davidson, for instance, takes seriously the idea that a formalization of what a theory of truth is, via a Tarski-style truth-definition, explains something, an idea Rorty eschews. Davidson of course practices both forms, doing non-formalizing therapeutic work on topics such as realism and anti-realism and well as applying systematic techniques to semantics. Sandbothe points out that both of these conceptions can be found not only in analytic philosophy but also in continental philosophy. So Sandbothe’s contrast is between therapy via formalization and system and therapy that discards system.

In this light, Carnap, Quine, and Wittgenstein are all therapists, with different techniques. On the continental side, Nietzsche goes with Wittgenstein and Husserl goes with Quine and Carnap. Such an analysis brings out the great change that has taken place in “analytic” philosophy in the last forty years or so, the return to systematic philosophy as solving problems about the world. In a way, from this perspective, Carnap and Husserl have more in common than Carnap and Lewis.

10) Barry Stocker’s “Time, Synthesis, and the End of Metaphysics: Heidegger and Strawson on Kant” investigates the differences between Heidegger and Strawson via their books on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . Both books have the mission of extracting what is valuable from what is of merely historical interest in Kant, thereby interpreting Kant as a precursor of their enlightened views. Since Kant is the last historical figure in the canon of both analytics and continentals, this turns out to be pretty interesting, both in the contrasts and in the similarities in what is taken to be important about Kant. The essay also presupposes that the reader already has a fairly detailed knowledge of the First Critique and the differences between the first and second editions.

Stocker treats the difference as illustrating the difference between analysis and critique. In brief summary, Strawson treats Kant as a theorist about the conditions of possible conceptual schemes, while Heidegger treats him as beginning to address the question of the ontological difference. So, again briefly, Strawson treats the First Critique as really about knowledge while Heidegger, preferring the first edition to the second, treats it as a treatise on the metaphysics of metaphysics.

As a consequence, Heidegger and Strawson have very different treatments of the preconceptual, which Strawson regards as incoherent and Heidegger regards as a glimmer of the question of Being. I could not follow the final part of the paper, suggesting that Heidegger is better able than Strawson to accommodate “showing” rather than “saying.”

This is, as one would expect, a very dense article that calls on the reader to look back at passages in Kant, and to be at home with the Heideggerian take on metaphysics and conceptual schemes.

11) Edward Witherspoon’s “Much Ado about Nothing: Carnap and Heidegger on Logic and Metaphysics” begins by showing that Carnap’s famous critique interprets Heidegger unfairly. Most of the rest of the essay discusses Heidegger’s conception of logic, and the sense in which Heidegger “rejects” logic. Heidegger thinks of Logic (capital “L”) as the constitutive “rules of thought,” that without which there could not be thought. Lower case “logic” is a theory of Logic. Heidegger’s thought, roughly, is that metaphysics is prior to logic, in that an understanding of Logic is required to have an adequate theory of logic.

Heidegger’s understanding of logic, one has to say, ignores the very substantial developments that assimilated logic to mathematics. One has to wonder at the level of current knowledge of a thinker who claims in the 1920’s that logic has not made progress since the Stoics. One wonders what Heidegger thinks of mathematics.

Carnap’s logical syntax of language, however, is not a very good foil. To claim that it is part of syntax to ask which arguments go with which predicates misses an important part of the idea of formal logic and syntax. One could also question, on Quinean grounds, the idea that logic is importantly “prior” to other kinds of knowledge.

Witherspoon argues that the Heideggerian conception of metaphysics as insight into Being, to be appreciated only if one has it, is akin to religious faith, which can only be seen to be reasonable if one has it. This take on Heidegger does not bode well for reuniting this section of the House with the analytic wing.

Humanism in the Renaissance Era

This essay is about Renaissance humanism and its impact on Western intellectual history. It explains how humanism emerged as a response to medieval scholasticism, promoting a curriculum based on classical studies to foster critical thinking and eloquence. Humanists like Petrarch sought to revive ancient texts, integrating their principles into contemporary life. The essay highlights the secular nature of humanism, its influence on art, politics, and education, and its role in fostering scientific inquiry. The invention of the printing press facilitated the spread of humanist ideas, which significantly shaped modern Western thought and laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment.

How it works

The epoch of Renaissance humanism stands as a pivotal juncture in Western intellectual annals, signifying a transformative phase in human thought. Emergent from the revival of classical philosophy, literature, and aesthetics, Renaissance humanism underscored the intrinsic worth and volition of human beings, both individually and collectively. This cultural and intellectual renaissance sought to rekindle the sagacity of ancient Greece and Rome, fostering a renewed emphasis on human potential and accomplishments.

At its nucleus, Renaissance humanism emerged as a rejoinder to the scholasticism prevalent in the Middle Ages, which had governed European cognition with a stringent, dogmatic approach to education and knowledge.

Humanists espoused a more dynamic and diversified approach to erudition. They championed an educational curriculum grounded in studia humanitatis, encompassing grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. This educational reform aimed to nurture multifaceted individuals adept at discerning analysis and articulate expression, priming them for active engagement in civil life.

Humanists accentuated the study of classical texts, positing that the wisdom of antiquity could serve as a beacon for contemporary thought and society. Figures such as Petrarch, often hailed as the “Father of Humanism,” scoured monastic archives for neglected manuscripts, endeavoring to resurrect the intellectual heritage of antiquity. This renaissance of classical scholarship transcended mere mimicry of ancient texts; instead, it involved the assimilation of their precepts into a modern milieu. Humanists aspired to synthesize the wisdom of antiquity with the exigencies of the present, propounding a philosophy that extolled human dignity, moral rectitude, and a logical approach to comprehending the universe.

A salient feature of Renaissance humanism was its secular disposition. While not antithetical to religion, humanism encouraged a focus on terrestrial matters and human affairs, positing that individuals could pursue knowledge and virtue beyond ecclesiastical confines. This paradigmatic shift is palpable in the oeuvre of artists, writers, and intellectuals of the period, who endeavored to probe and portray human experiences, emotions, and the natural realm with unparalleled veracity and precision. The artistic endeavors of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael epitomize this anthropocentric ethos, accentuating anatomical precision, perspective, and the aesthetic allure of the human physique.

Moreover, humanism exerted a profound influence on the political and social dynamics of the Renaissance era. Humanist intellectuals such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More delved into political philosophy, proffering novel insights into governance, authority, and ethics. Machiavelli’s treatise, “The Prince,” furnished a pragmatic, occasionally contentious, analysis of political leadership, while More’s “Utopia” envisaged an idyllic society grounded in humanist principles. These seminal works engendered discussions that would shape political ruminations for generations, underscoring the humanist conviction in the potential of human rationale to forge a fair and efficacious polity.

The dissemination of humanist ideals was facilitated by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century. This technological breakthrough enabled the mass production of books, rendering classical texts and humanist literature more accessible to a broader audience. The resultant surge in literacy and diffusion of erudition contributed to an environment conducive to the flourishing of humanist ideals, influencing education, culture, and intellectual pursuits across Europe.

Furthermore, humanism’s emphasis on individual potential and critical inquiry laid the groundwork for the scientific advancements of the Renaissance and beyond. Figures like Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, eminent for their pioneering contributions to astronomy and physics, were influenced by humanist precepts that advocated questioning established tenets and exploring the natural realm through empirical observation and experimentation. This spirit of inquiry and celebration of human achievement inherent in Renaissance humanism played a pivotal role in the evolution of modern science and the Enlightenment.

In summary, Renaissance humanism heralded a profound transformation in European thought and culture, accentuating the worth of human beings and the import of classical erudition. It fostered a novel approach to education, art, politics, and science that exalted human potential and sought to reconcile ancient wisdom with contemporary life. The legacy of Renaissance humanism persists in modern Western thought, epitomizing an enduring belief in the potency of human intellect and creativity to shape a brighter tomorrow.

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Guest Essay

Oil and Gas Companies Are Trying to Rig the Marketplace

By Andrew Dessler

Dr. Dessler is a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University.

Many of us focused on the problem of climate change have been waiting for the day when renewable energy would become cheaper than fossil fuels.

Well, we’re there: Solar and wind power are less expensive than oil, gas and coal in many places and are saving our economy billions of dollars . These and other renewable energy sources produced 30 percent of the world’s electricity in 2023, which may also have been the year that greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector peaked. In the United States alone, the amount of solar and wind energy capacity waiting to be built and connected to the grid is 18 times the amount of natural gas power capacity in the queue.

So you might reasonably conclude that the market is pivoting, and the end for fossil fuels is near.

But it’s not. Instead, fossil fuel interests — including think tanks, trade associations and dark money groups — are often preventing the market from shifting to the lowest cost energy.

Similar to other industries from tobacco to banking to pharmaceuticals, oil and gas interests use tactics like lobbying and manufacturing “grass-roots” support to maximize profits. They also spread misinformation: It’s well documented that fossil fuel interests tried to convince the public that their products didn’t cause climate change, in the same way that Big Tobacco tried to convince the public that its products didn’t harm people’s health.

But as renewables have become a more formidable competitor, we are now seeing something different: a large-scale effort to deceive the public into thinking that the alternative products are harmful, unreliable and worse for consumers. And as renewables continue to drop in cost, it will become even more critical for policymakers and others to challenge these attempts to slow the adoption of cheaper and healthier forms of energy.

One technique the industry and its allies have used is to spread falsehoods — for example, that offshore wind turbines kill whales or that renewable energy is prohibitively expensive — to stop projects from getting built. What appear to be ordinary concerned citizens or groups making good-faith arguments about renewable energy are actually a well-funded effort to disseminate a lie. Researchers at Brown University have revealed a complex web of fossil fuel interests, climate-denial think tanks and community groups that are behind opposition to wind farms off New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Fossil fuel interests also donate piles of money to sympathetic politicians who then make false claims about renewable energy and push oil and gas on their constituents even when renewable energy is cheaper. After the Texas blackout in 2021, which was caused in part by the failure of the natural gas system , politicians blamed renewable energy, and have since argued that more natural gas is needed to strengthen the state electrical grid .

The Texas grid could certainly be made more robust. But building backup natural gas plants that should ultimately sit idle 90 percent of the time is probably the most expensive way to address the problem, compared with approaches like paying consumers to cut their energy use when the electrical grid nears its limits.

One of the most pervasive pieces of misinformation being spread by fossil fuel interests is that we cannot run our society on renewable energy . It is true that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. However, we could deal with this by expanding our existing electrical grid to allow us to move clean energy from regions with excess to those with shortfalls. When that’s not sufficient, power sources that can be quickly turned on and off, like batteries or hydroelectricity, can match supply and demand. In the current U.S. grid, natural gas provides the primary balance for intermittent wind and solar, and we can keep using it that way — in very limited quantities — when we need it. One study published in 2020 showed that we could operate a grid that is 90 percent clean energy and 10 percent natural gas by 2035, which would produce energy for a cost similar to that of a grid with a continuation of current policies.

Alarmingly, fossil fuel interests are also looking to dictate how schoolchildren learn about the environment. Children are some of the most powerful messengers when it comes to climate awareness, so fossil fuel promoters are keen to shape their understanding from the start. They have succeeded in getting the Texas State Board of Education to reject textbooks that accurately depict the effects of climate change and extreme weather.

Fossil fuels do deserve credit for getting us to where America is today — rich beyond the dreams of anyone living before the Industrial Revolution. But oil and gas are not the fuels of the future; they are changing the climate and generating air pollution that kills millions of people each year . They also bolster autocratic petrostates, fuel conflicts over energy resources and contribute to geopolitical instability . Simply put, the industry’s lies can cost consumers their health, their money and their security.

With existing technologies, the United States can largely phase out oil, gas and coal. The last 5 percent to 10 percent of that process may be expensive, but credible estimates place the cost of getting to net-zero emissions within the historical range of energy costs. This means that a sustainable future hinges on politics, not technology or science.

Policymakers must now call out the fact that an industry facing obsolescence is distorting the market to try to shut out a superior competitor, clean energy. Make no mistake: Failure to do so may mean a planet no longer able to sustain human life in the style to which we have become accustomed.

Andrew Dessler is a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University. He is a writer of the newsletter The Climate Brink .

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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2 The Historiography of Analytic Philosophy

Michael Beaney, University of York

• Published: 01 October 2013
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In this chapter I offer an account of how analytic philosophy became constructed as a philosophical tradition, from its roots in the complex intellectual context of the last quarter of the nineteenth century to its dominant position across the world at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. I consider some of the histories of analytic philosophy that have been written, exploring the historiographical issues that they raise, with particular reference to Nietzsche’s distinction between monumental, antiquarian, and critical history, and subsequent debates about the relationship between rational and historical reconstruction. I end by outlining and defending the historical turn that has taken place in analytic philosophy over the last twenty years.

If you are to venture to interpret the past you can do so only out of the fullest exertion of the vigour of the present. (Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, 1874, p. 94)

The past alone is truly real: the present is but a painful, struggling birth into the immutable being of what is no longer. Only the dead exist fully. (Russell, ‘On History’, 1904c, p. 61)

History begins only when memory’s dust has settled. (Ryle, ‘Introduction’ to The Revolution in Philosophy , 1956, p. 1)

Nietzsche opens his brilliant early essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ with a quote from Goethe: ‘In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.’ He goes on to argue that we need history ‘for the sake of life and action’, and this forms a central theme throughout his subsequent work. We find it expressed again, for example, in On the Genealogy of Morals , where he attacks modern historiography for aspiring merely to mirror and hence resisting any kind of judgement (1887, ‘Third Essay’, § 26). In his early essay, Nietzsche distinguishes three species of history, which he calls ‘monumental’, ‘antiquarian’, and ‘critical’, corresponding to three ways in which history relates to the living person: ‘as a being who acts and strives, as a being who preserves and reveres, as a being who suffers and seeks deliverance’ (1874, p. 67). Monumental history provides a supply of the greatest moments in history for emulation and inspiration; antiquarian history gives a sense of the local coherence and rootedness of previous life and thought to satisfy our nostalgia for their imagined certainties; while critical history submits the events of the past to the tribunal of reason for examination and critique. Nietzsche argues that all three types of history are needed, each correcting the excesses of the other. Antiquarian history reminds monumental history of the terrain that makes possible the mountain peaks, for example, while monumental history rectifies the myopia of antiquarian history. Critical history encourages us to tackle the mountain peaks for ourselves, while foiling the epistemological escapism of antiquarian history.

The historiography of analytic philosophy provides excellent illustrations of Nietzsche’s three species of history. Standard textbooks tend to represent analytic philosophy as a progression from one mountain peak to another, from Frege’s Begriffsschrift through Russell’s theory of descriptions to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus , to name but three familiar summits. There are detailed works of scholarship that offer antiquarian powder to explode monumental mythology, such as Griffin’s book on Russell’s break with idealism (1991) and Uebel’s account of the Vienna Circle debate about protocol sentences (1992, 2007). As to critical history, this has been alive and kicking from the very dawn of analytic philosophy, from Frege’s criticisms of the views of his predecessors in the first half of The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), Russell’s reconstruction of Leibniz’s philosophy (1900), and Moore’s simplification of idealist arguments (1899a, 1903b), onwards. 1 Kripke’s use of Frege and Russell as the stalking-horses for his own theory of reference (1980) and his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following to motivate his idea of a ‘sceptical solution’ to a ‘sceptical paradox’ (1982) are just two more recent examples to illustrate the power and prevalence of the genre.

However, it would be misleading to suggest that any of these examples involve only one of Nietzsche’s three species of history. Rather, each combines different aspects of those species in varying degrees. Dummett’s first book on Frege’s philosophy of language (1973), for example, might be seen as combining the monumentalizing of Frege with critical reconstruction to further his own concern with developing a theory of meaning. Candlish’s recent book on the dispute between Russell and Bradley (2007) does not just provide a much-needed corrective to received views of this dispute but has its own underlying agenda—to argue for a view of philosophy that does justice to its historical dimension. Nietzsche’s tripartite distinction, though, offers a useful initial typology to indicate the range of accounts of the history of analytic philosophy and of analytic approaches to history, and a fruitful framework to explore some of the historiographical issues that arise from these accounts and approaches.

2.1 Context and Connection

Nietzsche’s essay was written in 1874, which was a significant year in the development of modern philosophy. 2 Lotze’s so-called ‘greater’ Logic was published, an expanded version of his 1843 ‘lesser’ Logic . Whether or not Lotze counts as a neo-Kantian himself, he undoubtedly had a major influence on both neo-Kantianism and analytic philosophy as it originated in its two main—German and British—branches. 3 This was especially true of his anti-psychologism and the Kantian distinction he drew between psychological genesis and logical justification. 4 A new edition of Hume’s Treatise was also published, to which the British idealist Green wrote long introductions attacking what he called ‘the popular philosophy’, a form of empiricism with roots in Locke’s Essay and confusions that became clear in Hume’s Treatise , according to Green. Green’s Cambridge contemporary and sparring partner, Sidgwick, also published his main work, The Methods of Ethics , in 1874. While Sidgwick may be far less well known today than Mill, he developed a more sophisticated form of utilitarianism which had a major influence on Moore and many subsequent ethical theorists such as Hare, Parfit, and Singer. 5

Lotze was the dominant philosopher in Germany at the time, and both Green and Sidgwick were leading figures in British philosophy. Green became White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford in 1878 (although unfortunately he died just four years later), and Sidgwick became Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1883. In 1874, though, there were two further significant publications by philosophers who, like, Nietzsche, were at the beginning of their careers: Brentano and Bradley. Brentano was the oldest of the three, and in 1874 he published his first major work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint , in which he sought to establish a new science of mental phenomena, thereby sowing the seed of the phenomenological tradition that came to fruition in the work of Husserl. Bradley had been taught by Green, and he was to succeed Green as the main representative of British idealism. Bradley’s first publication appeared in 1874, too, offering an interesting comparison with Nietzsche’s essay. Entitled ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’, it discusses a conception of ‘critical history’ close to Nietzsche’s. History, for Bradley, involves a ‘union’ of ‘the past in fact’ with ‘the present in record’ (1874, p. 8), and he rejects empiricist accounts that assume that past facts can simply be read off from present records. Instead, those records need to be subjected to interpretation and critical judgement. This idea was to influence Collingwood’s later insistence on the need to interrogate sources. 6 Whereas Nietzsche offers, essentially, a pragmatic rationale for critical history, namely, that it invigorates our current thinking, Bradley digs deeper and argues that history inevitably involves interpretation and criticism. The main themes of his idealist metaphysics are already visible in this early work. 7

1874 also saw two important publications by mathematicians. Both give little indication in their title of their revolutionary implications. One is called ‘On a Property of the Set of Real Algebraic Numbers’. In this paper Cantor first showed that the class of real numbers is not countable, thereby inaugurating his theory of transfinite numbers, which led—via the development of set theory—to the emergence of the paradoxes that are central to the story of early analytic philosophy. 8 The second is called ‘Methods of Calculation based on an Extension of the Concept of Magnitude’, and was Frege’s Habilitationsschrift , written to qualify him to teach back at Jena, where he had first gone to university and where he was to stay for the rest of his career. Still five years before his Begriffsschrift of 1879, which is what truly revolutionized logic, this earlier work nevertheless anticipates the main idea of his logicist project. The seed from which the whole of arithmetic grows, he argues, is addition, which he associates with the iteration of an operation, represented by an appropriate function. So the concept of a function holds the key to connecting the different areas of arithmetic (1874, pp. 57–8).

The other significant publication of 1874, which—together with Lotze’s Logic —marks the emergence of a debate that is central to the story of analytic philosophy right from the beginning, is Wilhelm Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology . Described as ‘the most important book in the history of modern psychology’ (Boring 1950, p. 322), Wundt here lays the foundations of empirical psychology by arguing that ‘consciousness’, or ‘inner experience’ as he defines it, can be investigated scientifically by direct self-observation. Wundt rejected Kantian criticisms of the scientific status of psychology, and five years later, he established Germany’s—and Europe’s—first psychology laboratory. (The very first in the world was founded just a year after Wundt’s Principles , in 1875, by William James at Harvard.) With Lotze leading the Kantian opposition, the battle-lines were thus drawn up in the debate about psychologism that raged well into the twentieth century, as both analytic philosophy and phenomenology sought to establish themselves in opposition to psychologizing tendencies in philosophy and, on the other hand, empirical psychology broke away from philosophy to launch itself as a separate discipline. Indeed, although the debate has sometimes gone quiet, as in the 1920s and 1930s, it has never really left the philosophical agenda, and arguments about the relationship between philosophy and psychology were reinvigorated by the naturalistic forms of analytic philosophy that developed after the Second World War. 9

In one year, 1874, then, we have works published which either represent or herald most of the great traditions of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western philosophy: neo-Kantianism, idealism, utilitarianism, phenomenology, scientific philosophy, as well as analytic philosophy—or at any rate, that branch of analytic philosophy that had its roots in work on the foundations of mathematics. Perhaps all we are missing are works representing positivism and pragmatism. Mach’s Analysis of Sensations was not to be published until 1886, although positivism counts as a form of scientific philosophy and Mach was both influenced by and made contributions to empirical (or physiological) psychology. The term ‘pragmatism’ did not make its public appearance until 1898, although Peirce’s essays of 1877–8 are often taken to mark the emergence of pragmatism and we might, in any case, see pragmatist ideas in Nietzsche’s philosophy. 10 As far as the history of analytic philosophy is concerned, this reminds us that the analytic tradition did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum, or in a space informed only by certain mathematical developments and local hostility to British idealism. 11 On the contrary, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, there was both intense debate about existing philosophical positions, such as empiricism, idealism, Kantianism, and psychologism, and germination of the seeds of the new traditions of the twentieth century, including phenomenology and pragmatism as well as analytic philosophy itself. Any proper understanding of the development of analytic philosophy, then, has to take account of its place in the broader intellectual context and its changing and contested interconnections with other traditions and disciplines. 12

2.2 Analytic Philosophy and Ahistoricism

As the two essays by Nietzsche and Bradley indicate, there was much discussion about the nature and role of historical understanding in the second half of the nineteenth century—in the period in which analytic philosophy itself has its origins. As is well known, however, analytic philosophy emerged with an entirely ahistorical self-image. Indeed, it might be said that its official ideology was strongly anti-historical. In one of his great purple passages, Frege has this to say about historical investigations in the introduction to The Foundations of Arithmetic :

The historical mode of investigation, which seeks to trace the development of things from which to understand their nature, is certainly legitimate; but it also has its limitations. If everything were in continual flux and nothing remained fixed and eternal, then knowledge of the world would cease to be possible and everything would be thrown into confusion. We imagine, it seems, that concepts originate in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we suppose that their nature can be understood by investigating their origin and seeking to explain them psychologically through the working of the human mind. But this conception makes everything subjective, and taken to its logical conclusion, abolishes truth. What is called the history of concepts is really either a history of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words. Often it is only through enormous intellectual work, which can last for hundreds of years, that knowledge of a concept in its purity is achieved, by peeling off the alien clothing that conceals it from the mind’s eye. (1884, p. VII/1997, p. 88)

Frege took himself to have revealed the ‘pure’ concept of a natural number, by defining the natural numbers as extensions of logical concepts. To show that this was indeed the right account, however, he had to explain what was wrong with previous conceptions of number, and he does this in the first half of the Foundations , discussing the views of Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and Mill, among others. To a certain extent, then, Frege himself does history of philosophy. It may only be ‘critical history’ of a fairly simple kind, but it is important nevertheless in motivating his own views. I have called this ‘historical elucidation’, alluding to Frege’s use of ‘elucidation’ (‘ Erläuterung ’) to refer to that pre-theoretical work that must be undertaken to get the basic (indefinable) concepts understood. 13 Although Frege does not talk of elucidation having an historical dimension, his work shows that it does. New views always need to be positioned in the historical space of past conceptions, as Frege realized after it was clear from the reviews of Begriffsschrift that no one had appreciated his achievement or project. 14 He recognized that an informal account of the kind offered in the Foundations was a necessary preliminary to the formal demonstration of his logicism that he later sought to carry out in the Basic Laws . 15

Russell’s and Moore’s contribution to the founding of analytic philosophy proceeded quite explicitly by critical engagement with the views of previous thinkers. Their rebellion against British idealism is the most familiar part of the story. 16 Less well known is the significance of the book Russell published in 1900: A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz . 17 This can justifiably be regarded as the first work of ‘analytic’ history of philosophy, heralding what later came to be known as ‘rational reconstruction’. 18 What is interesting about this book is that it was written before Russell’s conversion to the new quantificational logic of Frege and Peano. 19 This is not to say that it was composed while Russell was still under the influence of British idealism, however. It was written in the short transitional period in which Russell was rebelling against British idealism—and indeed, played a key role in that rebellion. As Russell himself later remarked (1959a, p. 48), what he realized in working on Leibniz was the importance of the question of relations, and he was led to reject what he called ‘the doctrine of internal relations’—that ‘Every relation is grounded in the natures of the related terms’, as he put it (1959a, p. 43). He saw this doctrine as characteristic of both British idealism (and Bradley’s monism, in particular) and Leibniz’s monadism. His rejection of British idealism was thus partly effected through his critique of Leibniz. 20

What a commentator must do, Russell writes, ‘is to attempt a reconstruction of the system which Leibniz should have written—to discover what is the beginning, and what the end, of his chains of reasoning, to exhibit the interconnections of his various opinions’ (1900, p. 2). In reconstructing Leibniz’s philosophy, Russell identifies five main premises that he argues generate not only Leibniz’s characteristic doctrines but also the inconsistencies that affect his philosophy. Exposition thus goes hand-in-hand with criticism, according to Russell. Indeed, the two are virtually inseparable, since the views need to be set out as clearly as possible to make judgements about them, and being alert to inconsistencies means respecting all the passages where claims are asserted or denied (cf. 1900, p. 3).

Russell’s conception of history of philosophy is further clarified in the preface to the book, where he distinguishes a ‘mainly historical’ from a ‘mainly philosophical’ approach. The first is concerned with influences, causes, context, and comparisons, while the second aims to discover ‘the great types of possible philosophies’, the understanding of which enables us to ‘acquire knowledge of important philosophic truths’ (1900, pp. xv–xvi). On this second approach, Russell writes, ‘the philosopher is no longer explained psychologically: he is examined as the advocate of what he holds to be a body of philosophic truth. By what process of development he came to this opinion, though in itself an important and interesting question, is logically irrelevant to the inquiry how far the opinion itself is correct’ (1900, p. xvi). Like Frege and the neo-Kantians, then, Russell draws a sharp distinction between psychological genesis and logical justification, which underlies his distinction between the two approaches to history of philosophy and his own obvious preference for the ‘mainly philosophical’ approach.

Both Russell’s distinction and preference have been characteristic of analytic historiography throughout the history of analytic philosophy, at any rate until fairly recently. Indeed, as the cases of Frege and Russell suggest, this analytic conception of history of philosophy is both historically and logically prior to the systematic projects pursued by analytic philosophers. Following Frege and Russell, analytic philosophers have offered (or borrowed) rational reconstructions in criticizing previous philosophical doctrines to motivate their own philosophical views, and presupposed the validity of the distinction between psychological genesis and logical justification in their methodology.

On Frege’s and Russell’s view, then, the history of philosophy is just a repository of different philosophical positions, understood as eternally given and towards which different philosophers take different attitudes. 21 The adoption of these attitudes may be explained either psychologically or logically, and the task of the ‘philosopher’ (as opposed to ‘historian’) is to sift out the logical reasons from the psychological causes in arguing for the correctness of their own philosophical position and incorrectness of all other positions. That this view itself emerges out of a particular intellectual context (late nineteenth-century anti-psychologism) is obscured by the very anti-psychologism it presupposes. It might also account for why Frege and (early) Russell did not see themselves as offering a ‘new philosophy’. The forms of realism they adopted (Platonism in the case of Frege, naïve realism in the case of Russell in his initial rebellion against British idealism) were hardly new positions—but more importantly, could not be seen as new by the approach to history of philosophy they adopted. What was new was their methodology, based on logical analysis and contextual definition. 22

Alternative conceptions of history of philosophy were available to Frege and Russell at the time they were writing. One such alternative was presented to Russell by Cassirer in his review of Russell’s book on Leibniz. 23 Cassirer appreciates the value of Russell’s ‘systematic interest’, which enables questions to be asked that are rarely raised in traditional accounts (1902, p. 533). But he criticizes Russell for his obsession with identifying contradictions. Conflicting views might well be found in Leibniz’s writings when taken as a whole, but the conflict may simply be the result of intellectual development or of different dialectical contexts, where different pressures or concerns are involved. Cassirer’s main example is Leibniz’s conception of substance, which in reworking the traditional Aristotelian conception by giving it a dynamic character, looked both backwards and forwards. Cassirer writes that ‘It would be entirely one-sided and unhistorical to judge this opposition, on which, as it were, the whole inner tension of the system rests, as simply a contradiction’ (1902, p. 539). According to Cassirer, there may be ‘tensions’ in philosophical systems, but this is what drives philosophical thinking, the proper understanding of which requires a synthesis of ‘historical’ and ‘philosophical’ approaches. We will come back to this in due course.

2.3 Russell’s Role in the Construction of Analytic Philosophy

As the cases of Frege and (early) Russell suggest, then, a philosopher’s general position shapes, and in turn is shaped by, their view of history of philosophy. Analytic philosophers ever since have tended to endorse critical history: past philosophical work is selected and rationally reconstructed for present purposes, providing both alternative views by means of which to situate one’s own view as well as ideas and arguments, judged to be good, upon which to build. In this second case, but even to an extent in the first case, this leads to a certain degree of monumentalizing, whereby key figures or doctrines are singled out for approval. Despite criticizing Kant’s conception of arithmetic, for example, Frege still referred to him as ‘a genius to whom we can only look up with grateful admiration’, and suggested that he was merely refining Kant’s notion of analyticity in pursuing his logicist project (cf. 1884, §§ 88–9/1997, pp. 122–3).

Russell engaged in a great deal of critical history throughout his life. As well as writing on past philosophers such as Leibniz and Kant, he also discussed the work of many of his contemporaries, including James, Bradley, Frege, Meinong, Poincaré, Bergson, Dewey, Broad, Ryle, and Strawson, to name just some of the most prominent. 24 All this engagement can be seen as culminating in his History of Western Philosophy , published in 1945. Its subtitle reveals that there is an element of antiquarianism here, too, though: ‘and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day’. The book is an unreliable guide to either the philosophers or the circumstances covered, but the brief final chapter makes clear Russell’s own position and also the critical function that his antiquarianism performs. Entitled ‘The Philosophy of Logical Analysis’, Russell argues that one of the main attractions of the philosophy he endorses is that it does not allow itself to be influenced by ‘mistaken moral considerations’ or ‘religious dogmas’. ‘In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms’, Russell writes, ‘one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings’ (1945/1961, p. 789). The antiquarianism thus turns out to be employed in criticizing the philosophies Russell rejects.

The scientific truthfulness of which Russell here speaks is a further reflection of that distinction between logical justification and psychological (or social or political) explanation that lies at the heart of both his and Frege’s methodology. It was also central to the methodology of logical positivism, especially in the work of Carnap and Reichenbach, for whom ‘scientific philosophy’ was seen as the way forward. 25 Indeed, the term ‘rational reconstruction’ was first brought to prominence in the book Carnap published in 1928, The Logical Construction of the World , and Reichenbach develops the idea further in his Experience and Prediction of 1938, in which he draws his famous distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. 26 Of course, these ideas themselves had a ‘context of discovery’ that we should not pass over without comment: they would certainly have had a special resonance in the 1930s and 1940s, as ‘conflicting fanaticisms’ were indeed raging across the world. 27

Through his critical histories and rational reconstructions, and his methodological discussions of logical analysis and justification, Russell did more than any other philosopher to establish analytic philosophy as the tradition that it is now generally recognized as being. But this did not happen overnight or in ways that it might seem natural to assume now, and the history of its establishment is instructive. Russell’s and Moore’s rebellion against British idealism took place during a relatively short period of time, between 1898 and 1903, but the naïve realism they initially adopted was hardly distinctive in itself. Indeed, realism had already been taking over from idealism in Oxford at the time of their rebellion. Thomas Case, who was Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy from 1889 to 1910, had published his Physical Realism in 1888, a book that even had ‘analytical philosophy’ in its subtitle, a term that is not used in any of Russell’s or Moore’s early writings. John Cook Wilson, who was Wykeham Professor of Logic from 1889 to 1915, was by then consolidating his position as the leading figure in Oxford realism and on the Oxford scene generally, although he published little in his lifetime and his Statement and Inference only appeared posthumously, edited from his lecture notes by one of his former students. 28 In the United States, there was also a realist movement, instigated by the so-called ‘new realists’ and continued by the ‘critical realists’. The former, comprising Holt, Marvin, Montague, Perry, Pitkin, and Spaulding, published their manifesto in 1910 and their book, New Realism , in 1912. 29 The latter, including Lovejoy, Santayana, and Roy Wood Sellars, published their Essays in Critical Realism in 1920. 30 There were realist movements elsewhere, such as in Berlin, where Trendelenburg’s work inspired an Aristotelian realism with similarities to Oxford realism, and in Austria, led by Meinong, influenced by Bolzano and Brentano. 31

What was distinctive of Moore’s and Russell’s realism was the emphasis placed on analysis, even if this, too, was initially conceived rather naïvely, as simply involving decomposition. With the emergence of the theory of descriptions in 1905, however, Russell’s analytic methodology (and to a lesser extent Moore’s) became more sophisticated. 32 There was still no talk of ‘analytic philosophy’, but in 1911 Russell gave a lecture to the Société Française de Philosophie entitled ‘Analytic Realism’. He described his philosophy as realist ‘because it claims that there are non-mental entities and that cognitive relations are external relations, which establish a direct link between the subject and a possibly non-mental object’, and as analytic ‘because it claims that the existence of the complex depends on the existence of the simple, and not vice versa, and that the constituent of a complex, taken as a constituent, is absolutely identical with itself as it is when we do not consider its relations’ (1911c/1992, p. 133). He went on to characterize his philosophy as an ‘atomic philosophy’, and by the late 1910s, he was describing his position as ‘logical atomism’, a term that also came to be used, though not by Wittgenstein himself, for some of the central ideas of the Tractatus . 33

In 1924 Russell wrote an article entitled ‘Philosophy of the Twentieth Century’, 34 in which he divides academic philosophy into three groups: adherents of classical German philosophy, including Kantians and Hegelians; pragmatists and Bergson; and ‘realists’, understood as those who are scientifically minded (1924b/1943, p. 228). He admits that the division is not exclusive, suggesting that William James can be regarded as a founder of both pragmatism and realism. Russell quickly dismisses Hegelianism, taken as represented by Bradley, and goes on to consider the views of James and Bergson. In the final ten pages, he discusses the ‘new philosophy’ of realism, ‘characterized by analysis as a method and pluralism as a metaphysics’ (1924b/1943, p. 240). He claims that it had three main sources, in theory of knowledge, logic, and the principles of mathematics. In logic, he notes that the ‘organic’ view of the idealists is replaced by atomism, and as far as the principles of mathematics are concerned, he remarks that only the new philosophy has managed to accommodate the results of the work of Cantor, Frege, and others. In theory of knowledge, Russell claims that the new philosophy, as against Kant, maintains that ‘knowledge, as a rule, makes no difference to what is known’. This was one of the slogans of the Oxford realists, which Collingwood later notoriously thought he could refute in three sentences. 35 So although Cook Wilson and the other Oxford realists of the period failed to appreciate the significance of the development of mathematical logic, 36 there is an extent to which they might be seen as enlisted by Russell in his group of twentieth-century philosophers. Whether or not one counts the Oxford realists as ‘analytic philosophers’ alongside Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein, their views are clearly important in the bigger story of the history of analytic philosophy. 37

2.4 The Early Historical Construction of Analytic Philosophy

The first use of the term ‘analytic philosopher’ to refer to at least some of those whom we would now count as analytic philosophers does not occur until 1931, when we find it in Wisdom’s Interpretation and Analysis in Relation to Bentham’s Theory of Definition . Wisdom recognizes an anticipation of Russell’s theory of descriptions, in its use of contextual definition to do eliminativist work, by Bentham in his theory of fictions. Key here is what Bentham calls ‘paraphrasis’: ‘that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity’. 38 Wisdom talks first of ‘logico-analytic philosophers’ and then just ‘analytic philosophers’, understanding analysis as the analysis of facts we already know (1931, pp. 13–15). A year later, the idea of paraphrasis, though not the term, is picked up by Ryle in ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’ (1932), in which he argues that the philosophical problems that are generated by certain kinds of expression (such as ones that appear to denote non-existent objects) can be resolved by rephrasing the relevant sentences. Neither Wisdom nor Ryle talk of ‘analytic philosophy’ (Wisdom just talks of ‘analytic philosophers’), but the explicit articulation of the idea of paraphrasis in the work of both Wisdom in Cambridge and Ryle in Oxford represents a definite stage in the construction of analytic philosophy as a tradition. 39

The first use of the term ‘analytic philosophy’ to refer to at least part of what we would now regard as the analytic tradition occurs in Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method of 1933. He uses it to refer to one of two ‘sceptical positions’ that he attacks in chapter 7 . What he has in mind, in particular, is the view according to which philosophy aims solely to analyse knowledge we already possess. He does not refer to Wisdom, but does mention Moore and Stebbing as advocates of this view. It is a ‘sceptical position’, he argues, because it denies that ‘constructive philosophical reasoning’ is possible (1933, p. 137), and he criticizes it for neglecting to examine its own presuppositions. Stebbing had herself drawn attention to this neglect in ‘The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics’ (1932), to which Collingwood refers, and she had attempted to identify these presuppositions, while admitting, however, that she could not see how they were justified. It is worth noting that what seems to have been the first use of ‘analytic philosophy’ occurs in a critique: it is often the case that positions are first clearly identified in attacking them. 40

Stebbing’s role in the story of analytic philosophy is frequently overlooked. In 1930, she had published A Modern Introduction to Logic , which might be regarded as the first textbook of analytic philosophy. Her preface to the first edition opens with the remark that ‘The science of logic does not stand still’, and she notes that all the textbooks then in use in British universities make no reference to the developments in logic that had taken place in the previous 50 years. In setting out to correct this, she covers a wide range of topics, from the logical ideas of Principia Mathematica and Russell’s theory of descriptions, to various issues in scientific methodology and the theory of definition. In 1933, together with Duncan-Jones, Mace, and Ryle, she founded the journal Analysis , initially conceived as the mouthpiece of the Cambridge School of Analysis. In the ‘Statement of Policy’ that introduces the first issue, we read: ‘the contributions to be published will be concerned, as a rule, with the elucidation or explanation of facts, or groups of facts, the general nature of which is, by common consent, already known; rather than with attempts to establish new kinds of fact about the world, of very wide scope, or on a very large scale’. Although it has long since allowed a broader range of contributions, Analysis continues to be one of the flagships of analytic philosophy. In the first five volumes of the journal, there was a lot of discussion of the nature of analysis, a debate in which Stebbing’s work was influential. 41

One of Stebbing’s key papers in this debate was the lecture she gave to the British Academy in 1933, in which she compared the conceptions of analysis of the Cambridge School and logical positivism. 42 This was one of the first attempts to bring together the two kinds of philosophy. It was also Stebbing who invited Carnap to London in 1934 to talk on philosophy and logical syntax, which introduced logical positivism to Britain, and where Carnap first met both Russell and Ayer. Stebbing thus played a crucial role in creating the dialogue between the Cambridge School of Analysis and logical positivism that was to provide a central theme in analytic philosophy as it developed in the 1930s.

Although ‘analytic philosophy’ was first used to refer to the Cambridge School of Analysis, it was soon extended to include logical positivism as well. Here, too, though, the term was not initially used by the positivists themselves. There had been no mention of it in the manifesto of the Vienna Circle, published in 1929, where the key phrase was ‘scientific world-conception’. Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein were mentioned as precursors, but as just three in a long list of other philosophers and scientists. In 1930 Carnap and Reichenbach founded Erkenntnis as the journal of logical positivism, and the first issue opens with an article by Schlick entitled ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’. This turning point was made possible by the development of the new logic, Schlick argues, but what was crucial was the insights it fostered: into the nature of logic as purely formal and the nature of philosophy as an activity clarifying meaning rather than a science establishing truth. Schlick talks here of ‘the profound inner rules of logical syntax discovered by the new analysis’ (1930/1959, p. 56), though not of ‘analytic philosophy’. There is similar talk in Carnap’s famous contribution to the second volume of Erkenntnis , ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’ (1932a).

Talk of ‘logical analysis’, and the obvious influence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus on the ideas of the logical positivists, clearly connected logical positivism to the Cambridge School of Analysis, and this connection was obvious to those who visited Europe from elsewhere. One such visitor was Ernest Nagel from Columbia University, who spent the academic year 1934–5 in Europe, and reported on his experiences for The Journal of Philosophy in ‘Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe’, published in January 1936. This is the first article with ‘analytic philosophy’ in its title, and the first article that refers to both Cambridge philosophy and the work of the Vienna Circle (and indeed the Lvov–Warsaw School) as analytic philosophy. Nagel reports on ‘the philosophy professed at Cambridge, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, and Lwów’ (1936, p. 6), but singles out the work of Moore, Wittgenstein, and Carnap for detailed discussion.

Carnap never took to the term ‘analytic philosophy’. In July 1935 he wrote to Quine about the titles of the courses that he had agreed to give in the States, to where he emigrated in December that year. He notes that Nagel had suggested ‘analytic philosophy’ for the elementary course he had proposed on ‘wissenschaftliche Philosophie’, given that translating it as ‘scientific philosophy’ might suggest that his subject was philosophy of natural science, which would be too narrow. But, he goes on, ‘I should not like this title very much’ ( Quine and Carnap 1990 , p. 181). In describing his work many years later in his intellectual autobiography (1963), he does not use the term.

The term ‘analytic philosophy’ did not really catch on until after the Second World War. 43 By then many of the logical positivists who had emigrated to the States after the Nazis had come to power in Germany had established themselves in key philosophy departments, most notably, at Chicago, UCLA, Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Iowa, and Minnesota. There was also increasing contact between British and American philosophers. Many philosophers from the States, either as students or as faculty, spent at least a year at either Oxford or Cambridge, and many British philosophers visited the States to give lectures. 44 The dialogue and cross-fertilization that this fostered made it natural to see a much broader movement developing, for which the umbrella term ‘analytic philosophy’ seemed eminently suitable. The first book to have this term in its title was Pap’s Elements of Analytic Philosophy , published in 1949. Pap distinguishes four main factions: Carnapians, Mooreans, Wittgensteinians or ‘therapeutic positivists’, and philosophers concerned to clarify the foundations of science and knowledge. That same year saw the publication of Feigl and Sellars’ classic collection, Readings in Philosophical Analysis . The title suggests that the emphasis is on the method of philosophical analysis rather than on a school or tradition of philosophical thought, but although the term ‘analytic philosophy’ is not used, the book made a major contribution to laying down the canon of analytic philosophy, 45 and the new methodology was taken as marking ‘a decisive turn in the history of philosophy’ (1949, p. vi). A further collection on Philosophical Analysis was published the following year, edited by Black (1950a) . Black does talk here of ‘analytical philosophy’ (though only once, in the preface), but he cautions against treating ‘Philosophical Analysis’ as forming ‘a “School” having well defined articles of association’ (1950b, p. 2). Rather, ‘analysis’ is used merely ‘to identify philosophers who share a common intellectual heritage and are committed to the clarification of basic philosophical concepts’ (1950a, p. v). 46

Further events strengthened this growing sense that a distinctive style or methodologically rooted tradition of philosophy had established itself. In 1950 Feigl and Sellars followed up their collection by founding the journal Philosophical Studies , which they edited until 1971. Reichenbach wrote a Whiggish history of the rise of scientific philosophy (1951). 1952 saw Austin and Hart become Professors at Oxford and Wisdom become Professor at Cambridge, and both Quine and Strawson published textbooks on logic. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations finally appeared in 1953, and both Quine and Wisdom published collections of their papers. 1953 also saw the first edition of Hospers’ Introduction to Philosophical Analysis . It was to go through three further editions over the next four decades and remains in print today, having introduced tens of thousands of students to analytic philosophy across the world. 47

In 1955 White edited the sixth volume, on twentieth-century philosophers, in a series on ‘The Great Ages of Western Philosophy’. Although the work of Croce, Santayana, Bergson, Husserl, and Sartre was represented, it was clear from the title—‘The Age of Analysis’—where the main action was now seen as taking place, in the analytic and pragmatist traditions. As White wrote in his preface, ‘the twentieth century has witnessed a great preoccupation with analysis as opposed to the large, synthetic, system-building of some other periods in the history of philosophy’ (1955, p. 9). The other philosophers covered were Moore, Whitehead, Peirce, James, Dewey, Russell, Carnap, and Wittgenstein. Even if there was still reluctance to use the name itself, analytic philosophy did indeed appear to have come of age.

2.5 Analytic Philosophy and the Early Construction of its Own History

In retrospect, it might seem remarkable that even in the 1950s, the term ‘analytic philosophy’ was far from being widely used for the tradition that is now generally regarded as having originated more than half a century before then. However, traditions do not, of course, spring up overnight. Methodologies must be sufficiently developed and examples of their application (whether successful or instructively controversial) must be readily available. Their place in methodological space must be secured and recognizably defined, with appropriate contrasts drawn in opposition to rival traditions. They also need to have constructed enough of their history to boast a pedigree. 1956 heralded something of a watershed in all these respects.

Four influential articles were published in 1956: Austin’s ‘A Plea for Excuses’, which offers the fullest statement of his methodology and illustrates its use; Grice and Strawson’s reply to Quine’s attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, which highlighted a debate that has been central to the history of analytic philosophy; 48 Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, where his famous critique of the ‘myth of the given’ was first articulated; and Place’s ‘Is Consciousness a Brain Process?’, which helped inaugurate a new phase in the development of philosophy of mind by arguing for the mind/brain identity thesis. 49 The first edition of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics was also published that year, as well as two collections of the most important of their papers by Russell and Tarski— Logic and Knowledge and Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics , respectively. These three books made clear just how deeply interconnected the concern with the foundations of mathematics is with issues in semantics and the philosophy of language, interconnections that have also been at the heart of analytic philosophy. 50

Two monographs helped consolidate the place of analytic philosophy in the history of philosophy, though in different ways. Urmson’s Philosophical Analysis: Its Development between the Two World Wars (1956) was the first history of analytic philosophy, discussing the rise and fall of both logical atomism and logical positivism, partly with the aim of clearing the ground for the new philosophy that was then emerging. (‘Philosophical Analysis’ is the title of the book, but Urmson also talks of ‘analysts’, ‘analytic theories’, ‘analytic philosophers’, and the like.) What was conceived as the ‘analytic movement’ was, in fact, something whose obituary was being written (cf. 1956, pp. 186–7). Historiography is always rich in irony, but it is certainly ironic that at the very point at which its obituary was being written, analytic philosophy was about to blossom into the dominant tradition in twentieth-century philosophy that it is now recognized as being. (It gives a twist to Russell’s remark, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that ‘only the dead exist fully’.) Of course, it did so by greatly broadening the meaning of ‘analysis’, as a limited number of reductive forms of analysis gave way to various forms of connective analysis, and in turn to the whole range of forms combining reductive and connective analysis in different ways that characterizes the contemporary scene. 51

One account that brought together some of these different forms of analysis was offered in White’s Toward Reunion in Philosophy (1956), which sought to show how the various strands of the analytic tradition merge with pragmatism once we recognize that describing, performing, and evaluating are all part of philosophizing. The book was based on a course on ‘Problems of Analytic Philosophy’ that White had begun teaching in the early 1950s at Harvard, which may have been the first course with ‘analytic philosophy’ in its title, although White remarks that it might just as well have been called ‘the Philosophy of Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and a Few Others with Whom They Have Succeeded in Communicating’ (1999, p. 129). White’s teaching at Harvard influenced a generation of analytic philosophers, including Cavell and Dreben, who were assistants on his course (1956, p. xi).

Two other books published in 1956 deserve mention here, which illustrate the growing dominance of analytic philosophy in all areas of philosophy and in perceptions of philosophy outside the academy. The first is Laslett’s collection of essays, Philosophy, Politics and Society , which might be taken to mark the beginning of analytic political philosophy. The collection was the first in a series of volumes edited by Laslett and others over the next 50 years, which show how analytic political philosophy developed. This first volume was published just two years after Elton’s collection on Aesthetics and Language (1954), which marks the beginning of analytic aesthetics. 52

The second book, The Revolution in Philosophy , consists of essays that originated in a series of talks given on the Third Programme of the BBC. In introducing the book, Ryle remarks that ‘History begins only when memory’s dust has settled’ ( Ayer et al. 1956 , p. 1), and suggests that twentieth-century philosophy is largely the story of the notion of ‘meaning’ ( Ayer et al. 1956 , p. 8), implying, though not explicitly asserting, that concern with meaning is the ‘revolution’ to which the title of the book refers. Chapters on Bradley (by Wollheim), Frege (by Kneale), logical atomism (by Pears), Moore (by Paul), the Vienna Circle (by Ayer), the later Wittgenstein (also by Paul), and two chapters on analysis (by Strawson and Warnock) follow. The chapter on Frege is worth noting: it marks the entry of Frege into the pantheon of analytic philosophers. We will return to this in the next section .

In the decade that followed, many more classics of analytic philosophy appeared, from Anscombe’s Intention (1957) and Chisholm’s Perceiving (1957), through Strawson’s Individuals (1959) and Quine’s Word and Object (1960), to Rorty’s collection on The Linguistic Turn , to mention just some of the highlights. 53 After positivist savaging, Strawson’s book restored metaphysics to analytic respectability, albeit in a ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘revisionary’ form. Rorty’s collection gave wide currency not only to talk of ‘the linguistic turn’ but also to the idea of there being two conflicting strands within linguistic philosophy—ideal language philosophy and ordinary language philosophy. 54 During the same period, further books on the history of philosophy appeared, including two editions of Passmore’s A Hundred Years of Philosophy (1957, 1966), G. J. Warnock’s English Philosophy since 1900 (1958, 1969), and Mary Warnock’s Ethics since 1900 (1960, 1966). G. J. Warnock’s book is highly parochial, giving the false impression that English philosophy is simply analytic philosophy: he discusses Moore, Russell, logical positivism, and Wittgenstein before passing on to his Oxford colleagues. 55 Passmore’s book, by contrast, is admirably comprehensive, even from the English perspective he admits he has. Beginning with Mill, he covers various forms of idealism, naturalism, realism, and pragmatism, as well as developments in logic, logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology. Cook Wilson, Collingwood, and Heidegger are discussed, for example, as well as Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein. 56 Mary Warnock’s book is also written from an English perspective, spiced by token exotic flavours from America and France, with chapters on Bradley, Moore, Prichard’s and Ross’ intuitionism, Ayer’s and Stevenson’s emotivism, Hare, and Sartre’s existentialism. 57

One other event from this period deserves mention here: the Royaumont colloquium of 1958. 58 Entitled ‘La Philosophie Analytique’, this was intended to facilitate dialogue between analytic philosophers and philosophers from continental Europe. Participants included Ryle, Austin, Strawson, Quine, Williams, Urmson, Hare, Merleau-Ponty, Wahl, and van Breda (the founder of the Husserl archives at Leuven). Various myths have grown up about this conference, and it is often seen as having only further cemented the idea of a rift between analytic and ‘continental’ philosophy. Many of the myths have now been exploded, 59 and the term ‘continental philosophy’ is highly problematic and unfortunate, not least because it both includes and excludes far too much. 60 In fact, just as in the case of ‘analytic philosophy’, the term ‘continental philosophy’ only gained currency well over 50 years after the relevant supposed origins. In his own paper at the conference, Ryle uses the term in talking of ‘the wide gulf that has existed for three-quarters of a century between Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy’, meaning by ‘Continental philosophy’ primarily phenomenology. 61 The term was also used, in a similar sense, by Mandelbaum in his Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association in December 1962. Mandelbaum talks here of ‘two movements which, together, may be said to dominate philosophy’, namely, ‘that species of analytic philosophy which stems from Moore and the later Wittgenstein’ and ‘the phenomenological–existentialist movement which is characteristic of philosophy on the Continent’, which he immediately goes on to call ‘Continental philosophy’ (1962, p. 7). That there is a ‘phenomenological–existentialist’ tradition is uncontroversial, though some may prefer to talk of two—albeit connected—traditions here; but it is misleading to use a geographical term to designate this. Nevertheless, its misleading character aside, many of the arguments that inevitably go on in philosophy departments when new appointments are made and public profiles are produced gradually came to be construed as battles between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophers, especially in the United States and Britain. These battles further illustrate just how the analytic tradition was partly constructed and consolidated in opposition to rival (constructed) traditions.

2.6 The Canonization of Frege

With the exception of selections from the Basic Laws of Arithmetic published in The Monist in 1915–17, there were no English translations of Frege’s work until 1948, when Black published his translation of ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ in the Philosophical Review . A second translation was published by Feigl the following year in Feigl and Sellars’ Readings in Philosophical Analysis . In 1950 Austin’s translation of The Foundations of Arithmetic appeared, and in 1952 Geach and Black published their Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege . Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap, in particular, had all acknowledged the importance and influence upon them of Frege’s work; but it was only once Frege’s writings were readily available in translation that English-speaking analytic philosophers began to pay attention to Frege. 62 Articles on Frege started to appear in the main philosophical journals in the 1950s, 63 and as mentioned above, Kneale contributed a chapter on Frege to The Revolution in Philosophy , published in 1956.

Two books stand out as crucial in the subsequent canonization of Frege as an analytic philosopher. The first is Anscombe’s Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus , published in 1959, in which she argued that failure to appreciate Frege’s work was the main cause of the ‘irrelevance’ of much of what had hitherto been published on Wittgenstein. 64 The early Wittgenstein ceased to be either bracketed with (middle) Russell as a logical atomist or regarded as a proto-positivist, but instead was seen as responding, at a deep level, to problems in Frege’s philosophy. The second book is Dummett’s monumental work, Frege: Philosophy of Language , published in 1973, in which Frege finally emerged from the shadows of other philosophers and came to be seen as a significant philosopher in his own right, with a semantic theory, so Dummett argued, that could be developed and employed in reformulating and solving many of the traditional problems of philosophy. 65

Dummett was not the only philosopher who held that the development of semantic theory was the key to dealing with a whole host of problems in the philosophy of language and mind. In a series of papers from the late 1960s, Davidson had advocated a similar programme. 66 In seeing a theory of truth as providing the basis for a theory of meaning, Davidson drew on Tarski’s work as well as Frege’s, further widening the sphere of analytic philosophy and reconnecting with earlier philosophers and logicians. 67 The so-called Davidsonic boom hit Oxford in the 1970s, combining with Dummett’s work to gradually loosen the hold that ‘ordinary language philosophy’ had had in Britain after the Second World War. This decline of ordinary language philosophy may also have increased willingness to use ‘analytic philosophy’ rather than ‘linguistic philosophy’ as the generic term for the various strands of the analytic tradition, including both ordinary language philosophy and ‘ideal language philosophy’. 68

In the States, the work of Quine, Kripke, and Putnam, criticizing many of the assumptions and doctrines of earlier analytic philosophy concerning meaning and the analytic/synthetic, a priori/a posteriori, and necessary/contingent distinctions, led to further distancing from that period. 69 For some, this was seen as inaugurating an era of ‘post-analytic philosophy’, 70 but most simply saw it as initiating a new phase of analytic philosophy, with a deepening and broadening of its various concerns in a revised form. With metaphysics firmly back on the agenda, ‘analytic metaphysics’ developed, bringing with it a whole range of issues, from the ontology of possible worlds to the metaphysics of mind. 71 This reinforced reconnection with the earliest phase of analytic philosophy, when metaphysics had not been repudiated, 72 and even pushed back the boundaries of what counts as this earliest phase, to include such remoter ancestors as Bolzano, who had criticized Kantian modal conceptions long before Quine, Kripke, and others. 73

2.7 The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy

In his introduction to Frege: Philosophy of Language , Dummett notoriously claimed that Frege’s Begriffsschrift ‘is astonishing because it has no predecessors: it appears to have been born from Frege’s brain unfertilized by external influences’ (1973, p. xxxv). He repeats the claim in his second book on Frege, alleging further that the philosophical system Frege constructed on the basis of his logic ‘owed, I believe, not very much more to previous philosophical work than did his formal logic to previous work in that field’ (1981a, p. xvii). In creating quantificational logic, Frege’s Begriffsschrift was indeed revolutionary, and his philosophy was undoubtedly driven by concern to articulate a corresponding epistemology and metaphysics; 74 but all this was far from unfertilized by external influences. Sluga was the first to show how mistaken Dummett’s historiography was, and since then much light has been shed on both the philosophical and the mathematical context of Frege’s work. 75 To take just one example: we now know that the very name ‘Begriffsschrift’ shows the influence of Trendelenburg and, through him, of Wilhelm von Humboldt. 76

The controversy over the interpretation of Frege brought to a head the growing sense, even within the analytic tradition, of the impoverished understanding that analytic philosophers had of their own history and of historiographical issues. 77 Historiographical debates had already been going on in history and philosophy of science, inspired, in particular, by Kuhn’s paradigm-shifting work of 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . This had encouraged more detailed investigation of the historical development of science, and deeper reflection about methodology, led, most notably, by Lakatos, whose work was published in the 1970s. In history of ideas, and especially history of political thought, too, there was increasing discussion of historiography, Skinner’s ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ of 1969 being particularly influential. In 1979 Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature appeared, which put grand narratives back on the table at the same time as questioning the continued existence of analytic philosophy (see e.g. p. 172), thereby raising the stakes for the historiographical self-consciousness of analytic philosophers.

In 1984, Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner edited a landmark collection of papers entitled ‘Philosophy in History’. Part I contains historiographical essays and Part II case-studies, including three in history of analytic philosophy: on Frege (by Sluga), Moore (by Baldwin), and Russell (by Hylton). In his own contribution to Part I Rorty distinguishes and discusses four genres in the historiography of philosophy: rational reconstruction, historical reconstruction, Geistesgeschichte , and doxography. The first three correspond, more or less, to Nietzsche’s three species of history: critical, antiquarian, and monumental, respectively. Rational reconstruction we have already noted is illustrated by Russell’s early book on Leibniz and is the most characteristic genre in analytic philosophy. Dummett’s first book on Frege provides another example, though here there are also aspects of Geistesgeschichte —monumentalizing Frege in the history of philosophy as the first person (rightly, on Dummett’s view) to make the theory of meaning the foundation of all philosophy. 78 Rorty characterizes Geistesgeschichte as ‘big sweeping’ stories that aim at ‘self-justification in the same way as does rational reconstruction, but on a different scale’ (1984, pp. 56–7). His own Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature clearly falls into this category. Geistesgeschichte play a central role in canon-formation, unlike doxography, which takes a canon for granted. Doxography, as Rorty conceives it, is based on the assumption that philosophical positions are eternally given, implying that history of philosophy is simply a matter of working out which positions a philosopher holds. As we have also already noted, doxography is illustrated in Frege’s and Russell’s writings on the history of philosophy.

Rational reconstructions and Geistesgeschichte inevitably prompt historical reconstruction, where antiquarian impulses seek to correct the distortions that the former involve. Sometimes this results in very detailed studies where antiquarianism rules; but it usually inspires accounts that combine rational and historical reconstruction in more satisfying ways. This is exactly what happened in the history of analytic philosophy—or the history of the historiography of analytic philosophy. At the beginning of the 1990s a wealth of works appeared that marked the beginning of history of analytic philosophy as a recognized subfield of philosophy. Two books on Russell, by Hylton (1990) and Griffin (1991) , offered careful reconstructions of the development of Russell’s early views, setting new standards of scholarship. This was reinforced by Baldwin’s book on Moore (1990), which provided the first substantial account of the full range of Moore’s philosophy. Weiner’s book on Frege sought to show how Frege’s philosophical thinking emerged out of his mathematical concerns, rejecting the assumption that Frege could be treated as ‘truly one of us’ (1990, p. 2). A collection of Diamond’s papers appeared (1991), which included her influential readings of Frege and Wittgenstein that were to inspire the ‘New Wittgenstein’ debate a decade later (see especially Crary and Read 2000 ). Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein was published (1990), which, alongside McGuinness’ earlier biography of the young Wittgen Stein (1988) , provided much-needed context to Wittgenstein’s often enigmatic remarks. A new collection on the analytic tradition reflected the historical turn that was taking place ( Bell and Cooper 1990 ), and Coffa’s long-awaited book on logical positivism appeared, reconstructing a ‘semantic tradition’, as he called it (1991). Uebel also published a monograph on logical positivism (1992), elucidating the internal debates within the Vienna Circle. Simons brought out a collection of essays on the Central European tradition in analytic philosophy (1992). Dummett made two further important contributions: Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (1991a), the sequel to his first book on Frege, was far more sensitive to the development of Frege’s thinking; and Frege and Other Philosophers (1991b), a collection of his papers, contained responses to some of his critics. Two years later he also published Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993a), goaded by the Zeitgeist, but bizarrely, discussing only Frege and Husserl. Bell’s book on Husserl (1990), written from an analytic perspective, also helped encourage dialogue between analytic philosophers and phenomenologists, even if controversy is never far away in such dialogue.

These books transformed the landscape of analytic philosophy. 79 In the new constituent field of history of analytic philosophy, articles, monographs, collections, biographies, and autobiographies have been appearing with ever increasing frequency. 80 Coupled with a stream of new editions and translations of the work of analytic philosophers (both well-known and lesser-known) and the burgeoning textbook industry that seeks to introduce that work to new generations of students right across the world, history of analytic philosophy now rivals more established areas of history of philosophy, such as history of ancient Greek philosophy and history of early modern philosophy, in terms of the number of academics that record it as one of their research and teaching interests. 81

In general, however, standards of historical scholarship in history of analytic philosophy have not yet reached the level that they are in history of ancient Greek philosophy and early modern philosophy. Rational reconstructions are still offered that have not learnt from the historical studies that are now available. Impressive as it may be as a series of rational reconstructions of canonical texts in the history of analytic philosophy, Soames’ Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), for example, still presents Russell’s theory of descriptions without mentioning Russell’s earlier theory of denoting; thinking through the problems faced by the latter is what actually led Russell to the former. 82 Doxography, too, will always be a temptation that serious history of philosophy must avoid. It is all too easy to take a canon for granted and ignore broader questions of context and connection, questions that are essential to address in developing awareness of the contingency and negotiability of canons.

In his discussion of historiography, Rorty criticizes doxography for its complacency about canon-formation. But he stresses how the other three genres complement one another. He notes that there is a ‘hermeneutic circle’ of rational and historical reconstruction, around which one must go many times before doing either sort of reconstruction, and talks of the tension between rational and historical reconstruction that generates the need for the self-justification that Geistegeschichte provides. 83 Ideally, balance between the genres should be struck in all work in history of philosophy; but this would be unrealistic. A more tolerant attitude is to recognize the diversity of approaches and encourage that diversity in the hope that the balance will be achieved over time in the ongoing and self-correcting work of the academic community as a whole. 84

In 2007 a new book series on the history of analytic philosophy was established, the first series of its kind, and the first volume was published in 2008. 85 In 2010, following the founding of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy, an online Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy was launched, again the first of its kind, and its first issue appeared in 2011. 86 In the case of both the series and the journal, ‘history of analytic philosophy’ is understood broadly, to include interconnections with other traditions and the work of philosophers who might be regarded as outside the analytic tradition. In both cases, too, the interaction between history of analytic philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy is stressed, an interaction that is seen as mutually beneficial. The present Oxford Handbook draws on and deepens the historical turn that has taken place in analytic philosophy, and the range of contributions from leading scholars that it contains testifies to the richness and significance of the work that is now being done in the field.

2.8 Analytic Philosophy and History of Analytic Philosophy

The historical turn in analytic philosophy has given fresh impetus and added relevance to the debates about the relationship between philosophy and history of philosophy that have taken place since the emergence of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers are now more aware that their rational reconstructions are contested, that interpretations of the views even of their own immediate predecessors cannot be taken for granted, that their own concepts, doctrines, positions, and problems have a history, that their assumptions have a context that may need to be explained, that there have been changes and fashions in their own tradition, and so on. I conclude this chapter by saying something in defence of the historical turn that has taken place.

As we have seen, from its origins in the work of Frege and Russell, analytic philosophy has had ahistorical tendencies. Analytic philosophers have engaged in history of philosophy, but often only to the extent of offering—or sometimes simply borrowing—rational reconstructions to further their own projects. They have tended to be uninterested in doing justice to the philosophers whose work they reconstruct, or in getting the historical facts right. 87 Given that the early analytic philosophers were all realists, this might seem ironic. Their mathematical and scientific realism, or epistemological and metaphysical realism, seems not to have been matched by any respect for historical realism. Such analytic philosophers need not repudiate historical realism; they may complain as loudly as anyone else when their own views are misinterpreted. Rather, they simply deny its relevance: while there are historical facts of the matter about philosophers’ actual views, this is for the historian to establish, not the philosopher. On their view, philosophical concepts, doctrines, positions, and problems are independent of their articulation by any particular person, and hence their attribution or misattribution to anyone is of no ultimate significance.

This is not the place for a full critique of ahistoricism. 88 I will make just four points here, drawing on what has been said in both this and the previous chapter . First of all, philosophical terminology is created and shaped by the uses of the past, and is essentially and inevitably contested, even if there are periods of consensus or local contexts where there is relative agreement. In the historical longer run, clarification is always needed, which requires serious engagement with past philosophical views. This is most obviously so when terms like ‘Kantian’, ‘Fregean’, or ‘Russellian’ are in play. To use such terms is to accept a commitment to justify that use by reference to some view that Kant, Frege, or Russell, respectively, actually held at some point. But there are similar commitments in the case of terms such as ‘analytic’ or ‘necessary’. In defining ‘analytic’ in the way he did in the Foundations , for example, Frege transformed Kant’s notion, even if he himself wrote that he did not intend to introduce a new sense, ‘but only to capture what earlier writers, in particular Kant , have meant’ (1884, § 3). To what extent this is actually so requires investigation of what Kant meant and any assessment of a claim about the ‘analyticity’ of a proposition requires explanation of the intended sense.

Of course, one might respond that as long as one defines what one means by a term, one can use it (Humpty-Dumpty-like) in whatever way one wants. However, any such definition will itself use further terms, and as Frege recognized, not everything can be defined, and at some point, at the most basic level, we have to rely on a ‘meeting of minds’. So elucidation, as he called it, is always required; and this, too, as I suggested in section 2.2 , has an historical dimension, since new views need to be positioned within the historical space of previous views if they are to be properly understood. 89

This leads on to a second criticism of ahistoricism. Philosophical concepts, doctrines, positions, and problems can indeed be regarded as independent of their articulation by any particular person—but only up to a point, or within local contexts, contexts that embed shared presuppositions or where a ‘meeting of minds’ can be relied upon. Debates involving those concepts, doctrines, positions, and problems depend on these shared presuppositions, which may not be explicitly articulated by the protagonists, but some of which may well need to be recognized for the debates to progress—whether to deepen the arguments, resolve the disagreements, overcome any stalemates, or diagnose any mistaken assumptions. As mentioned in section 2.4 above, Stebbing admitted that the Cambridge School of Analysis involved presuppositions that she was unable to justify, and this prompted Collingwood to criticize analytic philosophy for this failing, and later, more constructively, to articulate a view of philosophy in which the identification of presuppositions was its primary goal. Arguably, Collingwood went too far in the other direction, in advocating too strong a form of historicism, but I think he was right to see the identification of presuppositions as an important aim of philosophy, and one which requires history of philosophy in its pursuit.

Logicism provides a good example. In denying that mathematics is reducible to logic, Kant presupposed that logic was Aristotelian logic (and was right in his denial). In arguing that arithmetic can be reduced to logic, Frege had to expand the domain of logic, and today it is often presupposed that logic means Fregean logic (or some extension of it). Resolving debates about logicism, then, cannot proceed without clarification of what is meant by ‘logic’, in other words, without identification of the relevant presuppositions. 90 Another example is the distinction between psychological genesis and logical justification, which might be seen as one of the most fundamental presuppositions of analytic philosophy, from which its ahistoricism follows. Once we recognize this presupposition and understand its historical source, however, we see that it is shared with neo-Kantianism and British idealism, and hence that ahistoricism is not an inevitable consequence. It may have been questioned only relatively recently in the analytic tradition; but history of philosophy reveals alternative views of the relationship between philosophy and history of philosophy that are much healthier.

Ahistoricism is undermined, thirdly, when we appreciate how much of actual philosophical discourse involves engagement with the ideas of past philosophers. Philosophy is essentially ‘talking with a tradition’, to use Brandom’s words. 91 This can be obscured by the scientism that inhabits some regions of analytic philosophy. This is reflected, for example, in views of philosophical research based on scientific models: to work at the ‘cutting-edge’ of the discipline involves reading the very latest articles published in, say, Mind or Analysis , and coming up with criticisms, counterexamples, further arguments, or alternative theories in response. To read only the very latest articles, however, is not to philosophize in some purified atmosphere: one cannot breathe in an ahistorical vacuum. The past is simply telescoped into a shorter time-frame; and once debate develops, the time-frame inevitably expands to reveal its historical roots and engagement with tradition becomes more and more explicit. 92

Finally, bringing these last two points together, philosophizing always reflects, invokes, or presupposes some kind of underlying narrative, whether grand or modest, which reveals the location in the historical space of philosophical traditions. This narrative may be explicitly articulated in the main text of publications, but more often than not is implicitly exhibited in what Derrida (1972) called the ‘margins’ of philosophy—in prefaces, footnotes, correspondence, off-the-cuff remarks, gossip, and so on. It is imbibed in learning to philosophize in a certain way, and is in turn transmitted through teaching and discussion. It may be publicly defended, but will typically be taken for granted in the culture or context in which the philosophizing occurs, and may function at subconscious levels. We are thrown into a particular philosophical life-world, in other words, and history of philosophy is required to appreciate our philosophical Dasein and hence to transcend our historical embodiment.

The narratives that form our philosophical self-identity may well involve distorted views of the past, myths, misinterpretations, and so on. These ‘shadow histories’, as Watson (1993) called them, may be even more important than real histories. 93 Dummett saw Frege as rebelling against German idealism, for example, 94 while Russell is all too readily assumed to have slain Bradley. 95 Carnap’s infamous attack on Heidegger’s supposed ‘pseudo-statement’ that ‘The Nothing itself nothings’ (‘ Das Nichts selbst nichtet ’) has become a classic of uncharitable interpretation, 96 and the literature on Wittgenstein is full of exotic characters, from Russellstein to Kripkenstein and now New Wittgenstein (or various New Wittgensteins). 97 Myths are contagious, however, and sooner or later these shadow histories require correction. If analytic philosophers prize truth, clarity, and rigour, and wish to divest themselves of the ‘local and temperamental bias’ of which Russell spoke (see section 2.3 above), then they should extend their analytic methods to investigating and correcting their own narratives and self-identities.

All four points suggest ways in which philosophy has an intrinsically historical dimension and in which history of philosophy is essential to philosophy. History of philosophy plays a crucial role in clarifying concepts, doctrines, positions, and problems; it identifies presuppositions and opens up alternative views; it makes us appreciate the tradition in which our conversations take place; and it develops self-consciousness and corrects shadow histories. Analytic philosophy has become the tradition in which much philosophizing is now pursued, so that talking with the analytic tradition may form one’s first conversations. In this context, it is inevitable that history of analytic philosophy should have emerged. History of analytic philosophy is analytic philosophy come to self-consciousness; it provides the forum for richer dialogues with the past, combining in multifarious ways monumental, antiquarian, and critical history, rational and historical reconstruction. This has also expanded the repertoire of methods of analysis on which philosophers can draw, through various forms of historical and textual analysis—genealogical analysis, presuppositional analysis, hermeneutics, deconstructional analysis, among others. Analysis itself has been deepened and broadened, synthesizing, we might say, logical/conceptual and historical/textual modes of analysis.

The spread of analytic philosophy across the world, and its ramification into all subfields of philosophy and into interdisciplinary projects, is also cultivating new dialogues with other traditions and disciplines, which will in turn transform them all, reconfiguring their conceptual and historical interconnections. This will require new analyses, interrogations, and narratives that renegotiate the positioning and oppositioning involved in those traditions and disciplines, in the ways we have seen exemplified in the account given here of the construction of the analytic tradition. The future for history of analytic philosophy—and for augmented and invigorated analytic philosophy—promises new enlightenment. Explicare aude! Have courage to offer your own (historically informed) analyses!

I discuss the role of what I call ‘historical elucidation’ in Frege’s Foundations in Beaney 2006a , and the significance of Russell’s ‘rational reconstruction’ of Leibniz in Beaney 2013a . For an account of Moore’s ‘refutation’ of idealism, see Baldwin 1990 , ch. 1.

See the chronology of analytic philosophy and its historiography that follows this chapter.

Defining ‘neo-Kantianism’ has proved controversial. In its narrowest sense, it covers the philosophy of the so-called Marburg and Southwest Schools, originating in the work of Hermann Cohen and Wilhelm Windelband, respectively, dating from the early 1870s. More broadly, it also covers earlier philosophers writing after Kant, who in some way concerned themselves with Kant’s philosophy, such as Kuno Fischer, Hermann Lotze, and Otto Liebmann (who originated the ‘Back to Kant’ slogan in 1865), as well as other philosophers not directly associated with the two main schools such as Hans Vaihinger and, more controversially, Wilhelm Dilthey. Gabriel (2002) suggests that Lotze is the founder of neo-Kantianism; while Anderson (2005) distinguishes between ‘orthodox’ and ‘non-orthodox’ neo-Kantianism, the former corresponding to the narrower sense just identified. In his helpful account of the relationship between neo-Kantianism and anti-psychologism, Anderson defines orthodox neo-Kantianism precisely by its commitment to anti-psychologism, in emphasizing both the objectivity and the normativity of logical and philosophical principles. The concern with normativity is an important feature, according to Anderson, and rules out as orthodox neo-Kantians others such as Frege and Husserl who also stressed the objectivity of logic (2005, pp. 291, 305–6). On the nature of neo-Kantianism, cf. also Köhnke 1986; Adair-Toteff 2003; Makkreel and Luft 2010.

On Lotze’s influence on Frege, see Gabriel’s chapter in this Handbook. On the importance of the distinction between psychological genesis and logical justification in analytic philosophy, see Beaney 2013a .

See Schultz 2011.

See especially Collingwood 1946 /1993. On the development of Collingwood’s views on historiography, see Wilson 2001 .

For further discussion of this work, see Walsh 1984 .

See Tappenden’s chapter in this Handbook.

For an account of the debates about psychologism, especially around the turn of the twentieth century, see Kusch 1995 , 2011 ; cf. Travis 2006b . On the relationship between philosophy and psychology, see also Reed 1994 ; Hatfield 2002 , 2012 . On the development of naturalistic forms of analytic philosophy of mind, see Crawford’s chapter in this Handbook.

Hookway (2008 and Bernstein (2010 do not mention Nietzsche at all in their accounts of pragmatism. But Rorty (1998) does count Nietzsche as a fellow pragmatist, citing Berthelot 1911 as the first work in which Nietzsche is classified with James and Dewey and where Nietzsche is first called a ‘German pragmatist’. Cf. also Rorty 1991 , p. 2.

One of the aims of the detailed chronology that follows this chapter is to provide further reminders of the richness not only of the analytic tradition itself but also of the broader scientific and philosophical context in which analytic philosophy developed.

On aspects of the background to analytic philosophy, see the chapters by Gabriel, Skorupski, Tappenden, and Hyder in this Handbook, and on the relationship of analytic philosophy to British idealism, pragmatism, and phenomenology, see the chapters by Griffin, Misak, and Smith, respectively. For substantial accounts of British idealism, American pragmatism, and phenomenology, see Mander 2011 , Misak 2013 , and Moran 2000 , respectively.

See Beaney 2006a . For Frege’s use, see Frege 1899 [1980], pp. 36–7 (where Frege talks of ‘Erläuterungssätze’—‘elucidatory propositions’); 1906 [1967], pp. 288–9 (in Frege 1984 , pp. 300–1, ‘Erläuterung’ is mistranslated as ‘explication’); 1914 [1997], pp. 313–14 (in Frege 1979 , pp. 207–8, ‘Erläuterung’ is mistranslated as ‘illustrative example’). For further discussion of elucidation, see e.g. Weiner 1990 , ch. 6, 2001, 2005; Conant 2002 ; Reck 2005, 2007 .

Frege was prompted, in particular, to read and criticize Boole’s work; see May and Heck’s chapter in this Handbook.

His three seminal papers of 1891–2 can also be seen as essentially elucidatory papers, though here there is less historical positioning.

See Griffin’s chapter in this Handbook.

One of the few commentators to recognize its significance is Hunter (1993) .

For a fuller account of this, see Beaney 2013a .

Russell first met Peano in August 1900, an event that Russell described as ‘a turning point in my intellectual life’ (1975, p. 147). His book on Leibniz was published in October, but he had finished writing it in March and had received the proofs in June. Only the preface was written after this turning point, in the same month—September 1900—as he first started extending Peano’s calculus to the logic of relations. (Cf. the chronology in Russell 1993 , pp. liii–liv.) Russell called this month ‘the highest point of my life’ (1975, p. 148): a month that included both his recognition of the revolutionary power of the new logic and his presentation to the world of the first rational reconstruction in analytic history of philosophy.

Russell’s concern with Leibniz, however, was accidental. He was asked to give a course of lectures on Leibniz in Cambridge in Lent Term 1899, in place of McTaggart, who was away at the time. Cf. Russell 1975 , p. 136, 1993, p. 511.

On this conception, cf. Rée 1978 .

See the previous chapter in this Handbook.

The review occurs in an appendix to Cassirer’s own book on Leibniz (1902, pp. 532–41). Another review was by the Leibniz scholar and translator Robert Latta (1901) . Both reviews are briefly discussed in Hunter 1993 , pp. 407–9.

For the range of Russell’s writings on other philosophers, see the various volumes of his Collected Papers .

See especially Reichenbach 1951 .

For an account of the development of the idea of rational reconstruction, see Beaney 2013a . Cf. Schickore and Steinle 2006 .

As Nagel described one of the functions of analytic philosophy in 1936, ‘it requires quiet green pastures for intellectual analysis, wherein its practitioners can find refuge from a troubled world and cultivate their intellectual games with chess-like indifference to its course’ (1936, p. 9).

Wilson 1926 . For discussion of the Oxford realists, and in particular, Case and Cook Wilson, see Marion 2000 , 2006a , 2006b , 2009 . On Case’s and Cook Wilson’s perceptual realism, see Hatfield’s chapter in this Handbook; and on Cook Wilson’s influence on later Oxford philosophers, see Beaney 2012a , and Travis and Kalderon’s chapter.

Spaulding’s contribution was called ‘A Defense of Analysis’, certainly suggesting that Russell and the new realists were kindred spirits.

Drake et al. 1920 . See also Sellars 1916 . For a brief account of early twentieth-century American realism, see Kuklick 2001 , ch. 11. The movement is often forgotten: it receives virtually no discussion in The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy ( Misak 2008 , for example.

On the Austrian tradition in analytic philosophy, see Nyirí 1981 , 1986 ; Simons 1992 , 1999 ; Smith 1994 ; Textor 2006 . Australian realism can be taken to begin in 1927, when Anderson (who had been influenced by Alexander, in particular went to Sydney as Challis Professor of Philosophy and published ‘Empiricism’; see Baker 1986 ; Armstrong 2001 .

See §1.1 of the previous chapter ; and for more on Russell’s and Moore’s conceptions of analysis, and the range of conceptions that we find in the history of philosophy, see Beaney 2007c , 2009a .

See Russell 1918 , 1924a ; repr. together in Russell 1972 . Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s logical atomism are discussed together in, for example, Urmson 1956 , Part I . The first monograph on Wittgenstein’s logical atomism is Griffin 1964 . On Russell’s logical atomism, see also Klement 2009 , and on Wittgenstein’s logical atomism, see Proops 2007 .

The article was later reprinted in Twentieth Century Philosophy: Living Schools of Thought , edited by Runes (1943 . It opens Part II , which also includes chapters on Kantianism, Hegelianism, Thomist humanism, transcendental absolutism (by Santayana), personalism, phenomenology, logical empiricism (by Feigl), American realism, pragmatism (by Dewey), dialectical materialism, naturalism, and philosophies of China. The crudity of Russell’s typology is thus shown up by the rest of the book. The book also shows that ‘analytic philosophy’ is still far from being recognized as a distinct, let alone dominant, tradition.

Collingwood 1939 , p. 44, in the chapter entitled ‘The Decay of Realism’. For an account of his critique of the Oxford realists, see Beaney 2013b .

In commenting on Russell’s paradox, in correspondence with Bosanquet in 1903, Cook Wilson had written: ‘I am afraid I am obliged to think that a man is conceited as well as silly to think such puerilities are worthy to be put in print: and it’s simply exasperating to think that he finds a publisher (where was the publisher’s reader?), and that in this way such contemptible stuff can even find its way into examinations’ (1926, II, p. 739). As Ayer later put it, Cook Wilson ‘had sat like Canute rebuking the advancing tide of mathematical logic’ (1977, p. 77).

In A Hundred Years of British Philosophy (1935 [1938]), Metz has a chapter on ‘The Older Realism’ (52 pages), discussing Case and Cook Wilson, among others, and a chapter on ‘The New Realism’ (175 pages), discussing Moore, Russell, and Whitehead, among others.

Bentham 1843 , p. 246; quoted by Wisdom 1931 , p. 92. On the significance of the idea of paraphrasis, see Beaney 2009a , §6. Cf. also Quine 1981b , pp. 68–9.

Three years later, in Problems of Mind and Matter , Wisdom does indeed talk of ‘analytic philosophy’: he writes that his book is intended as an introduction to it, though he stresses that analytic philosophy ‘has no special subject matter’ (1934, p. 2). Ryle, by contrast, never uses the term. In fact, his attack on ‘isms’ in philosophy (1937b) and his qualms about the notion of analysis (see e.g. 1957, pp. 263–4) suggests outright opposition to its use, even though he would agree with Wisdom that philosophy is an activity rather than a science. Cf. § 1.4 of the previous chapter .

For an account of Collingwood’s critique of analytic philosophy, see Beaney 2001 ; cf. 2005c.

On analysis, see also the supplementary volumes of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society published in 1934, where the question ‘Is analysis a useful method in philosophy?’ is debated by Black, Wisdom, and Cornforth, and 1937, where the question ‘Does philosophy analyse common sense?’ is debated by Duncan-Jones and Ayer.

Stebbing 1933a . Cf. Black 1938 . For an account of Stebbing’s work on analysis, see Beaney 2003b . On the debate about analysis in the Cambridge School of Analysis, see Baldwin’s chapter in this Handbook.

As mentioned in n. 34 above, the collection on Twentieth Century Philosophy published in 1943, for example, makes no reference to ‘analytic philosophy’ as a distinct tradition.

For details of some of the most significant visits, see the chronology that follows this chapter.

For the record, the philosophers whose work is canonized are (in order of appearance): Feigl, Kneale, Quine, Tarski, Frege, Russell, Carnap, Lewis, Schlick, Aldrich, Ajdukiewicz, Nagel, Waismann, Hempel, Reichenbach, Moore, Stace, Sellars, Broad, Chisholm, Mace, Ducasse, Stevenson. Davidson (1980 , p. 261) reports that he got through graduate school by reading Feigl and Sellars.

The same caution had been urged by Black twelve years earlier (1938, p. 24). Black’s caution provides a straightforward counterexample to Preston’s claim that, from its earliest uses until at least the 1960s, ‘“analytic philosophy” in the nominative sense was employed clearly and consistently to refer to…a school of philosophy’, understood as defined doctrinally (2007, p. 79). Preston does not mention Black’s work. As I hope this chapter shows, the history of the construction of the analytic tradition is much more complex—and explicable—than Preston makes out in his claim that it is just the history of an illusion (on the grounds that there are no defining doctrines); cf. n. 56 Close in chapter 1 above. For criticism of Preston’s claim, see Beaney 2007e .

The first edition was published in the United States in 1953, but not in Britain until 1956, however. The first and second editions open with a chapter on philosophy and language, aimed at showing how philosophical problems can be clarified and some of them solved or dissolved by attention to the language in which they are formulated. The chapter was deleted in the third edition of 1990, but—after complaints—restored in a shorter form in the fourth edition of 1997, a history that is itself revealing of the development of analytic philosophy. The first chapter of the first edition is entitled ‘Words and the World’ and of the second edition (1967) ‘Meaning and Definition’, for example. The original title was restored in the fourth edition. On the changes here, see Hospers’ preface to the fourth edition.

For discussion of this debate, see the chapters by Baghramian and Jorgensen and by Shieh in this Handbook.

See Crawford’s chapter in this Handbook. For some other articles published in 1956, see the chronology that follows this chapter. Mention might also be made, for example, of the article by Chisholm in which he defends Brentano’s thesis that intentionality is the mark of the psychological. A translation of Tarski’s seminal paper on truth (1933) was also published that year.

On the importance of recognizing this, see Floyd 2009 , especially p. 164; and for more on this theme, see Floyd’s chapter in this Handbook.

For an account of the range of different conceptions of analysis, see Beaney 2009a . On the distinction between reductive and connective analysis, see Strawson 1992 , ch. 2.

On the development of analytic political philosophy and analytic aesthetics, respectively, see Wolff’s and Lamarque’s chapters in this Handbook.

For many more see the chronology that follows this chapter.

Rorty notes in his introduction (1967, p. 9) that the term ‘the linguistic turn’ was introduced by Bergmann. Bergmann uses it in his review of Strawson’s Individuals ( Bergmann 1960 ). On Bergmann and the significance of the linguistic turn, see Hacker’s chapter in this Handbook.

The first edition contains a (weak) chapter on logic, removed in the second edition on the (mistaken) grounds that it was no longer characteristic of English philosophy. However, he does add (justifiably) some paragraphs on Cook Wilson. (Cf. his preface to the second edition.)

As well as incorporating revisions, the second edition also contains an additional final chapter entitled ‘Description, Explanation or Revision?’, responding to the issues raised by Strawson’s Individuals (1959).

Only six years separate the first and second editions, but a third edition was published in 1978. Here Warnock adds a postscript on, among other works, Rawls’ Theory of Justice , noting in her preface that it no longer seems possible to distinguish moral from political philosophy. On developments in ethics and political philosophy in the analytic tradition, see the chapters by Dancy, Driver, and Wolff in this Handbook.

The proceedings were published in Cahiers de Royaumont , 1962.

See especially Overgaard 2010 ; Vrahimis 2013.

Despite making this point, Leiter and Rosen persist in using the term ‘continental philosophy’ for what they call ‘(primarily) philosophy after Kant in Germany and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, on the grounds of there being no better alternative term, though they only consider ‘post-Kantian’ and ‘post-Hegelian’ (2007b, p. 2). Of course, they can hardly avoid so persisting in a Handbook of Continental Philosophy , but that the ‘Continent’ should be identified (even ‘primarily’) with Germany and France is only the most immediately obvious objection. For much fuller discussion of the question ‘What is continental philosophy?’, and attempts to (re)construct a tradition out of all the disparate ‘non-analytic’ traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western philosophy, see Critchley 1997 , 2001 ; Glendinning 1999b , 2006 ; Boundas 2007c ; cf. Mulligan 1991b . A far more monumental construction is provided by Schrift 2010 –. On the controversial relationship between analytic and ‘continental’ philosophy, see Agostini 1997 ; Akehurst 2008 ; Buckle 2004 ; Campbell 2001 ; Carman 2007 ; Chase and Reynolds 2011 ; Cooper 1994 ; Dascal 2001 ; Egginton and Sandbothe 2004 ; Glendinning 2002 ; Glock 2008 , ch. 3; Himanka 2000 ; Levy 2003 ; Mandelbaum 1962 ; May 2002 ; Prado 2003 ; Reynolds et al. 2010 ; Richmond 1996 ; Rosen 2001 ; Simons 2001 ; Staten 1984 ; Williams 1996 (where the analytic/continental distinction is compared to dividing cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese; p. 25.

Ryle 1962 [1971a], p. 189. Ryle’s paper was called ‘Phenomenology versus “The Concept of Mind”’, and he provocatively suggests that his own book ‘could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label’ (p. 196). A few years earlier, Austin had suggested that he was doing ‘linguistic phenomenology’ (1956 [1979], p. 182).

The exception, of course, was Russell, who had provided the first account in English of Frege’s philosophy in Appendix A of The Principles of Mathematics in 1903. Carnap’s Meaning and Necessity of 1947 also contains significant discussion of Frege’s ideas.

Many of these were reprinted in Klemke 1968 , the first collection of papers on Frege.

Cf. Anscombe 1959 , p. 12. On the importance of Anscombe’s book for our understanding of Wittgenstein, see Diamond’s chapter in this Handbook. For further discussion of the influence of Frege on Wittgenstein, see the works cited in n. 17 Close of the previous chapter .

For more on the importance of Frege in the development of history of analytic philosophy, see Floyd 2009 , § 4.

See the papers collected in Davidson 1984 .

On the development of theories of meaning, see Miller’s chapter in this Handbook.

On linguistic philosophy as comprised of these two strands, see especially Rorty 1967 (as mentioned above). The rise and fall (and historical construction) of linguistic philosophy deserves its own separate treatment. For accounts, see Hacking 1975 ; Hanfling 2000 ; Hallett 2008 ; Beaney 2012a . For classic critiques of linguistic philosophy, see Gellner 1959 ; Mundle 1970 .

For an account of the work of Quine, Kripke, and Putnam, see Baghramian and Jorgensen’s chapter in this Handbook.

For references, see n. 7 Close of the previous chapter .

For an account of metaphysics in the analytic tradition, see Simons’ chapter in this Handbook.

On the metaphysics of early analytic philosophy, see Beaney 2012b .

On Bolzano’s critique of Kant, see Lapointe 2011 , and Textor’s chapter in this Handbook.

I talk neutrally here of ‘corresponding’, since the question of the relative priority of Frege’s logic, epistemology, and metaphysics is controversial. I am convinced, however, that Frege’s philosophy essentially arose from thinking through the implications of his use of function–argument analysis, extended from mathematics to logic. For elaboration of this, see e.g. Beaney 2007d , 2011a , 2012b .

See especially Sluga 1980 , and for subsequent accounts of Frege that are more historically informed, see e.g. Baker and Hacker 1984a ; Weiner 1990 ; Carl 1994 ; Beaney 1996 ; Burge 2005 (which collects together his papers on Frege from 1979 onwards); Kienzler 2009 ; Künne 2010 . On the historical context of Frege’s work, see especially Gabriel and Kienzler 1997 ; Gabriel and Dathe 2000 ; the papers in vol. 1 of Beaney and Reck 2005 ; and Gabriel’s chapter in this Handbook. On the mathematical background, see the papers in vol. 3 of Beaney and Reck 2005 ; Tappenden 2005 , 2006 ; Wilson 2010 ; Hallett 2010 ; and Tappenden’s chapter in this Handbook. On Frege’s influence on subsequent philosophy, see Burge’s chapter.

See Thiel 1995 /2005; Gabriel’s chapter in this Handbook.

Other controversies that might be mentioned here include the debate about Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following and private language, and the question of the influences on Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle. Early criticisms of Kripke’s interpretation include Baker and Hacker 1984b and McGinn 1984 . Investigation of the influences on Carnap was spearheaded by Coffa and Friedman in the early 1980s. Coffa’s work was eventually published in 1991, and a collection of Friedman’s papers appeared in 1999.

See especially 1973, ch. 19; 1981a, ch. 3.

For further discussion of the historical turn in analytic philosophy, see the papers in Reck 2013 .

For some of the highlights, see the chronology and bibliography that follow this chapter.

Ten years ago, only a handful of philosophers recorded history of analytic philosophy as an area of research specialism or teaching competence. Today most medium or large English-speaking departments have at least one person who gives this as one of their areas. In Leiter’s ‘Philosophical Gourmet Report’ < http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com >, history of analytic philosophy (including Wittgenstein is one of the specialities evaluated, one of nine history of philosophy specialities.

Soames’ work has been especially controversial. For reviews, see e.g. Kremer 2005 ; Rorty 2005 ; Beaney 2006b ; Hacker 2006 ; Wilson 2006b . For his replies to critics, see Soames 2006a , 2006b . Cf. also Floyd 2009 . For deeper understanding of Russell’s theory of descriptions, see Hylton 1990 , 2003 ; Linsky and Imaguire 2005 ; Stevens 2011 .

1984, p. 53, fn. 1; p. 68. I discuss rational and historical reconstruction further, and offer my own resolution of the tension in what I call ‘dialectical reconstruction’, in Beaney 1996 , ch. 1; 2013a.

This has been the editorial policy in the present Handbook, within the obvious constraints of seeking representative coverage of the main philosophers, views, and themes.

The series was inspired by Candlish’s monograph on the Russell/Bradley dispute (2007, which was reissued in paperback as the third volume of the series (see Beaney 2009b ). The first volume was Nasim 2008 , and there are now over 20 volumes published, with many more in the pipeline. For the record, the volumes are, in order: Nasim 2008 , Wagner 2009 , Candlish 2009 [2007], Venturinha 2010 , Coliva 2010 , Lapointe 2011 , Stevens 2011 , Patterson 2012 , Landini 2012 , Duke 2012 , Wagner 2012 , Gandon 2012 , Pardey 2012 , Textor 2013 , Korhonen 2013 , Chapman 2013 , Engelmann 2013 , Reck 2013 , D’Oro and Sandis 2013 , Mulligan, Kijania-Placek and Placek 2013 , Schaar 2013 , Arana and Alvarez 2013 , Griffin and Linsky 2013. For details, see the website for the series: < http://www.palgrave.com/products/series.aspx?s=hap >. See also the chronology that follows this chapter.

Information on the Society and Journal can be found at: < http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~philos/sshap > and < http://jhaponline.org >, respectively.

As Kripke notoriously put it in introducing his ‘sceptical interpretation’ of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following, ‘my method is to present the argument as it struck me, as it presented a problem for me’ (1982, p. viii). Light was eventually shed on those remarks, but only by recognizing the differences between Kripkenstein, as Kripke’s Wittgenstein came to be called, and Wittgenstein himself.

For fuller discussion, see especially the essays in Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner 1984 ; Hare 1988 ; Sorell and Rogers 2005 ; Reck 2013 . See also Glock 2008 , ch. 4, and some of the replies in the special issue (no. 1) of Teorema , 30 (2011). For an account of the German historicist tradition, see Beiser 2011 .

Cf. Floyd’s discussion in her chapter in this Handbook of the ‘interpretive need’ that is left behind by every analysis or rigorization. Satisfying this interpretive need will also have an historical dimension.

For discussion of the issues here, see MacFarlane 2002 .

The phrase forms the title of Part One of Brandom 2002 . On Brandom’s inferentialist reworking of Gadamerian hermeneutics, grasp of conceptual content itself is understood as ‘the ability to navigate and negotiate between the different perspectives from which such a content can be interpreted (implicitly) or specified (explicitly)’ (2002, p. 109). Conversing with tradition is thus constitutive of understanding meaning. Brandom’s view is also influenced by Sellars’ conception of history of philosophy as the lingua franca of philosophy; Sellars 1973 ; cf. Floyd 2009 , p. 167.

In discussing the relationship between analytic philosophy and history of philosophy in correspondence with Isaiah Berlin, Morton White remarks: ‘Curiously enough, if one treats a contemporary writer one is thought to be original, whereas if one treats a far greater figure of the past, one is thought to be derivative or parasitical, or what have you. Nonsense, I say.’ He goes on to suggest how an historical work can be transformed into a ‘pure’, ‘original’ one: ‘One writes the first, with references to other people, pages, chapters, verses, expounding them and criticizing them; then one goes over the manuscript, carefully eliminating all the inverted commas and references, and starts talking about the theory of the ghost-in-the-machine or category mistakes or traditional dualism, etc., etc. Immediately one ceases to be Byzantine and becomes Greek, thereby becoming original and unparasitical. Nonsense, I say’ (1999, p. 248).

For discussion and critique of one such shadow history, see Crawford’s chapter in this Handbook.

See e.g. Dummett 1973 , pp. 197–8, 541, 683–4.

For critique of this assumption, see Candlish 2007 .

Carnap 1932a , § 5. Carnap’s attack is discussed by Friedman in A Parting of the Ways (2000); cf. Friedman 1996 ; Inwood 1999 ; Gabriel 2003 ; Witherspoon 2003 .

See Russell 1922 ; Kripke 1982 ; Crary and Read 2000 ; Read and Lavery 2011 . On readings of Wittgenstein, see the chapters by Kremer, Glock, and Diamond in this Handbook.

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GOP's 'law and order' message at odds with their defense of Trump: ANALYSIS

Republicans have long proclaimed themselves the party of "law and order."

That political philosophy, however, doesn't seem to have extended to the historic criminal trial of Donald Trump that ended this week in a first-ever conviction of a former president -- 34 guilty verdicts handed down by 12 ordinary Americans.

Conservative allies of their party's presumptive presidential nominee didn't miss a beat jumping to his defense, or echoing his denouncement of the case as "rigged."

House Speaker Mike Johnson called it "a shameful day in American history" and claimed the trial was a "political" exercise, not a legal one. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the other leading Republican on Capitol Hill, asserted the charges levied against Trump "never should have been brought in the first place."

Trump's legal challenges have been rejected so far, but he still can appeal and has vowed to do so. Yet, many GOP members of Congress continue to parrot Trump's falsehoods about the trial and the American legal system more broadly.

House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik said -- despite a jury deciding -- that the trial's outcome showed how "corrupt, rigged, and unAmerican the weaponized justice system has become under Joe Biden and Democrats."

Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the influential House Judiciary Committee, is demanding Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and prosecutor Matthew Coangelo testify before Congress, alleging "political persecution." And a group of GOP senators are vowing to block any of Biden's agenda from passing in response, they say, to his making a "mockery of the rule of law."

"I don't really see how you can have it both ways, to claim to be the party of law and order and then to denounce trials that don't come out the way you want them to," William Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told ABC News about the Republican response.

In the New York trial, Trump's attacks are largely geared toward the district attorney, the judge and the jury -- all of which he's claimed are unfairly politically biased against him. He and other Republicans have taken aim at Bragg being an elected Democrat, and the jury being made up of residents of a liberal-leaning city.

Their ire also extends to President Joe Biden, whom Trump has claimed, without evidence, was behind the prosecution despite the case being handled entirely at the state level.

"These are bad people," Trump said in grievance-filled remarks at Trump Tower the morning after his conviction. "These are, in many cases, I believe, sick people."

President Biden, in his own remarks later that day from the White House, pushed back that the rule of law was "reaffirmed" and statements questioning the legitimacy of the process were "reckless" and "dangerous."

"[Trump's] attacks on the judicial system have a long history and are part of a larger strategy to undermine the legitimacy of any aspect of the political system or process that criticizes him or tries to hold him accountable for his actions," Lisa Miller, a political science professor at Rutgers University who specializes in crime research, told ABC News.

"As far as I am aware, the process in New York followed the same rules of evidence and procedure as any other criminal trial and the defense has just as much opportunity to select the jurors as the prosecution," Miller continued. "By all accounts, the judge was fair-minded and even-handed. It serves only Donald Trump to say otherwise."

Galston agreed, saying in his view "the process of the trial stayed within normal bounds."

"There was a normal and impartial jury selection process," he said. "Each side could reject people for cause and had a certain number of peremptory challenges. There hasn't been a whisper of jury misconduct, which is relatively rare in such high-profile cases."

Trump has been leading the charge in decrying not only the hush-money case, but the other three indictments against him, including federal cases levying more serious allegations of conspiracy to defraud the United States and willful retention of national defense information. Trump has denied any alleged wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty in every case.

In each circumstance, he and his conservative allies have pointed to what they claim is a corrupt justice system as the real culprit of wrongdoing.

The statements, experts said, are likely to have a harmful effect on the nation's confidence in bedrock American principles.

"Unfortunately, a lot of damage has already been inflicted on public trust in American institutions," Galston said. "Certainly trust in Congress has been at rock bottom. The presidency isn't doing so well. The judiciary enjoyed a good measure of public trust and confidence a lot longer than other institutions did, but that's been falling for some time and I'm afraid that this will add momentum to the decline."