What is analytic philosophy?

So far as I'm concerned, "analytic philosophy" is a family resemblance notion (and therefore not subject to the sort of analysis of which analytic philosophers are supposed to be so fond). The notion of a "family resemblance notion" comes from the later Wittgenstein—there is no common characteristic shared by all of analytic philosophy, there are groups of overlapping characteristics without any firm notion of which or how many need to occur together to make something a work of analytic philosophy. Actually, even this won't do, because, of course, "analytic philosophy" is an historical notion. Even though Socrates asked for a definition of piety in Euthyphro and criticized attempts at a definition in a way that warms the heart of every analytic philosopher, the Euthyphro is not a work of analytic philosophy.

I'm not going to attempt any serious historical analysis in this course. I have doubts about the utility of the classification except insofar as it serves to mark the kind of thing we analytic philosophers think should count as a model of how philosophy should be done. (And of course calling a work "Heideggerian" serves, at least for many, as a way of marking it as the sort of thing that analytic philosophers think should not be done in their department. Carnap practically says that in an article we'll be reading.)

Thus, we are studying certain papers because they have influenced us and our immediate predecessors, and so are necessary to know about to know what's going on, and because they have served and continue to serve as models, not to arrive at some accurate historical picture. The history is "textbook history" much like that at the beginning of science textbooks. I'll try to avoid making false historical claims, but I won't try very hard to make true ones either.

It is said that a certain passage in Frege's Grundlagen (1884) is the beginning of analytic philosophy. I think that that is an appropriate story, but it needs to be supplemented by Moore's early attacks on idealism.

The main two ingredients are a certain style of (perhaps linguistic) analysis and what Russell called a "robust sense of reality," meaning, following Moore, that idealism is out of the question and of course a bit more than that.

Frege is going to tell us what numbers are. He begins by claiming or arguing that if we knew how numbers were used in identity statements, the rest would follow. The idea is that all statements about numbers are somehow derivative of identity statements. Then he makes the move that founds analytic philosophy: he says that all we need to know, to know what there is to know about numbers is how the number words contribute to the truth and falsehood of the identity statements. He derives a metaphysical claim from a linguistic one, the "context principle": to know everything about the meaning and reference of word, one just needs to know what contribution it makes to the meaning and reference of the sentences in which it occurs.

The context principle is important because it turns compositionality on its head: the meanings of words are to be derived or discerned from the meanings of the sentences in which they occur, converse to the usual story of compositionality according to which the meaning of a sentence is composed of the meanings of the words.

But that is not why the passage has been taken to mark the beginning of analytic philosophy. The whole procedure puts the analysis of language before metaphysics. In this class, we are studying the philosophy of language first, before metaphysics and epistemology (and we're omitting piety altogether). That procedure would be impossible outside of analytic philosophy. That is not to say that every analytic philosopher thinks it is correct procedure.

There is something else about the passage that shows something important about what is characteristic of analytic philosophy: Frege reduces the problem of understanding the use of number words in language to that of understanding their use in identities alone. I think he thought of that procedure as allied to a mathematical one, but the analytic tradition has taken it to be allied to scientific reduction: if you can characterize medium-sized dry goods as made up of atoms, then you can understand the behavior of medium-sized dry goods in terms of the behavior of atoms.

The other ingredient in analytic philosophy is Moore's dismissal of idealism (The Refutation of Idealism 1903). We'll read one incarnation of that in class. Idealists claim that there is no material world external of our (or some) minds. There is an old saying "One philosopher's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. That led to a second affinity between analytic philosophy and science: they are studying the same world, and experience of that world is at least potentially relevant to both. When Moore wrote, idealism was absolutely dominant. Most of his (and Russell's) teachers were idealists and there was a worldwide philosophical idealist consensus. Moore wasn't just stating a belief or preference, he was waging idealogical warfare for the soul of philosophy.

Combining the two tendencies, we get Russell, and a good deal of the rest of analytic philosophers get these tendencies and attitudes directly from him or by inheritance from those who did. Russell, like everyone else, made some outright mistakes. Unlike almost everyone else, most of Russell's outright mistakes were accepted by virtually every analytic philosopher for 50 years and more. If this were an historical course, one could produce a lot of evidence for how much the influence of Frege and Moore was mediated by Russell by tracing those mistakes. Example: Frege's theory was about concepts and objects; but Russell took it to be about propositional functions and classes. Well into the 1960s and still to some extent today, Frege's views are presented and discussed as if they concerned classes.

What other kinds of philosophy is analytic philosophy to be contrasted with? The list has, at various times, included Continental philosophy: phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, post-X, for all X, and various kinds of philosophy based on political analysis: Marxist philosophy, feminist philosophy, Straussianism. That is not to say, of course, that there isn't good analytic philosophy concerned with the phenomenology of consciousness, dread, class-based political analysis, and so forth. The point is rather that these are not taken as fundamental starting points.

-- ShaughanLavine - 22 Aug 2005