LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS (also called ‘Analytic
Philosophy’) and Logical Positivism:
Analysis: as opposed to synthesis, the
making of systems a la Hegel --a problem centered, piece-meal
way of doing philosophy.
Linguistic: based on an analysis of language,
though not a philosophy of language: tends to reformulate problems at the level
of language --not,
Is metaphysics possible, but Are metaphysical propositions meaningful; not,
What is knowledge, but, What do we mean
by, Peter knows that 'p'; not, Is religion true, but first you have to clarify,
what if anything do you mean by, God exists.
(Claimed) advantage of reformulating problems at the
level of language: appears to add an element of objectivity to philosophical
procedures.
Like phenomenology, Linguistic Analysis is more a
method or way of doing philosophy than a set of doctrines; but (again like
phenomenology) it tends to take on the doctrinal predilections of its foremost
practitioners. Its practitioners are
very interested in clarity, or pretend to be, in contrast to some continental
philosophers: talking in philosophy should be precise and clear and evidently
meaningful, not poetic. They also term
their procedure, 'clarification of concepts', and more recently, 'functional
analysis' = analysis of how the words are functioning in a particular 'language
game', what they are being used to do.
Indeed nowadays the emphasis on language itself, the ‘linguistic’ bit in
the description, has become less and less important, in favour
of concentration on the issues themselves.
Linguistic Analysis is not a school, more a milieu
in which each is familiar with the publications of the other. Its practitioners tend to trace their roots
to the British Empiricists Locke, Berkeley and particular David Hume:
·
Hume, for example, is
frequently used to set up the problems for us, e.g. personal
identity, freedom and necessity, causation, (sometimes) the existence of
God.
·
There is also Hume's
distinction between statements enunciating 'relations of ideas' and those
enunciating 'matters of fact and existence'.
With respect to relations of ideas, we need experience to get the ideas
but not to know about their relations.
With respect to matters of fact and existence, we need experience to get
the ideas and also to know whether they obtain or not. Any pretense therefore to knowledge of
matters of fact and real existence, which is not based on experience, is
sophistry and illusion.
·
There is, again, Hume's test
for meaningfulness: since ideas are derived, eventually, from impressions, if
you suspect a word is being used without any clear meaning, it makes sense to
ask from what impression that idea is derived.
·
Finally, Hume himself
sometimes engages in what can be re-interpreted as conceptual analysis, e.g. of
'cause', or altruism and egoism.
A lot of the lesser
participants in the movement and even some of the greater ones (Wittgenstein,
but not Russell) tend to be rather partial in their knowledge of the history of
philosophy.
Linguistic
Analysis as a style of doing philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon
world derives directly from a reaction particularly on the part of G.E. Moore
and Bertrand Russell to the Neo-Hegelianism that dominated the British
philosophical scene up to about 1924, people saying: time is not real, the
truth is the whole, the Whole is Absolute Spirit (F.H. Bradley 1846--1924, J.E.
McTaggart 1866-1925). The movement as a
whole may be usefully divided into three periods:
1st period: 1925--1930: George E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein
George E.
Moore:
(1873--1958, professor of philosophy at
While
Ludwig
Wittgenstein 1889--1951, eventually followed
2nd Period: 1930--1945: Logical Positivism, sometimes
termed Logical Empiricism: Coming
from the 'Vienna Circle', a group of people in Vienna, Austria, influenced by
the ideas of the physicist Ernst Mach, consisting among others of Moritz
Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann.
They are most famous for the test for
meaningfulness termed the Principle of
Verification or Verifiability, which may be formulated in various
ways:
1) "The meaning of a linguistic expression is
its method of verification": The meaning of a statement e.g. in science is
to be identified with the operations which would need to be performed in order
for the statement to be verified. If a
set of such operations cannot be specified, the statement is to be regarded as
meaningless.
To put it briefly, a statement is meaningful if
and only if it is verifiable. Note
however: all that is required for meaningfulness is verifiability --it doesn't actually have to have
been verified, at which stage it would not only be meaningful, it would also be
true.
2) In so far as verification is by reference to
experiences which other people could also have, the principle may be
reformulated: the meaning of an expression = the difference it would make to
what you would experience in certain specified circumstances were it true
rather than not true.
3) There are only two kinds of propositions: the
analytic propositions of logic and mathematics expressing tautologies, and
synthetic propositions relating to experience.
It is from the third formulation above that the
movement gets its name, Logical Positivist, sometimes Logical Empiricist, the
'positivist' part of the label harking back to the positivism/scientism of
Auguste Comte.
With
the Nazi occupation of
As
a theory of meaning and even as a principal of demarcation of science from
non-science, the principle has been undermined, from at least three
directions:
(I) No matter how formulated, the principle tends to undermine itself: it is neither analytic a
priori, nor synthetic based on experience, the Verification Principle itself is
neither verifiable nor falsifiable, you can't specify a set of operations etc.,
therefore it is meaningless --which is rather inconvenient, to say the
least.
(ii) Certain
developments within the philosophy of science:
·
Scientific theories
unfortunately for the L.P.'s can't be verified, they can only be falsified:
general statements can never be conclusively verified unless the class is
closed. For a scientific theory, you deduce consequences from the theory and
then test the consequences. If you
construe this as verification, you are committing the logical fallacy of
affirming the consequent. Thus Karl
Popper. Popper suggests instead of
verifiability a Falsifiability Criterion of
demarcation (rather than a criterion of meaningfulness) --a criterion of
demarcation of science from non-science: for a statement to belong to science,
you have to be able to specify an in principle experiencable situation which
you would be prepared to accept as a falsification of that statement. This rules out, e.g.
Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxist Historical Materialism, as unscientific. .
·
Imre Lakatos: even Popper's position is
naive. Scientists don't in fact give up a theory until they have a better one.
In practice there is always a core of theory, which is all but impervious to
falsification --it's only the attempted applications of the theory, which get
discarded when they don't work. Until a better theory comes along, the
recalcitrant phenomena are mere difficulties, phenomena that have yet to be
explained. Better to talk of progressive
and regressive scientific research programs, with people gradually changing
sides. .
·
Paul Feyerabend: even Lakatos is naive.
Neither verification nor naive falsification nor even sophisticated
falsification (= Lakatos) is adequate to the facts of the history of
science. There is no logic to it. Anything goes, and anything should be allowed
to go, including metaphysics. Theoretical anarchism: all facts are theory laden,
the more theories we have the more chance the facts have of getting through to
us. People who think this is a bit
extreme may prefer, instead:
·
Thomas H. Kuhn: there are two kinds of
science, the relatively ordered normal science, and revolutionary science --one
'paradigm' as he calls them replacing another, e.g. Galileo replacing
Aristotle, Einstein and Quantum Theory replacing Classical Newtonian Physics.
In revolutionary science the logic of normal science breaks down, there is no
logical procedure for going from one to the other, you get converted, and your
opponents eventually die out. This is because paradigms usually have their own
conception of what counts as good science, among other things. Within normal science, in non-revolutionary
situations, you can specify rules of the game however.
(iii) Logical Positivism has been undermined,
finally, from within the philosophy of
language: as a general theory of linguistic meaningfulness the verification
principle fails miserably. For a start,
the conveying of information is only one of the functions of language. Even for this function it doesn't work, cf.
above on philosophy of science. This
last, the failure of the verifiability principle as a general criterion of
linguistic meaningfulness, or, rather, its realization by Ludwig Wittgenstein, led to an identifiable third phase in the
history of analytical philosophical:
3rd Period: Wittgenstein again, and Ordinary Language
Philosophy: 1945ff. Wittgenstein from
the early 1930's began towards a radical change in his philosophy of language,
as expressed (posthumously) in his Philosophical Investigations
(1953). This meant among other
things a rejection of his own Tractatus:
·
Language is like a game e.g. of football, a
communal activity played according to a set of more or less well defined
rules. There are many sub-games within
the larger game, e.g. giving and receiving orders, reporting an event,
speculating about an event, asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying,
promising, baptizing, marrying, making a contract --a variety of language uses;
and in the Tractatus he had treated
only one of them. All these uses are
senseful in their own way, and we should not judge all the uses by one use,
that of the scientific observer. .
·
"Don't ask for meaning --ask for
use": the meaning of an expression is what it is used to do, in the
context of a particular language game being played by a particular linguistic
community. Sentences are connected up
with jobs in accordance with a complex set of rules; two sentences have the
same meaning if the rules for the use of the sentences in a particular game are
the same, e.g. would you open the door, open the door please --both regularly
used to ask someone to open the door; e.g. What time is it? Hoe laat is it? Que
hora es? etc. Translation is the replacement of a
sentence in one language game with a sentence that has a similar use in the
other language game.
·
These rules are the property of the
linguistic community, what you enter into and own when you become a language
user within that linguistic community, or when you start playing a particular
language game. To enter into such a game
is to enter into a form of life. Note
that a person's knowledge of the rules is mostly implicit --it's not to be thought
that the rules are explicitly formulated or even that they could be by participants
in the language. Children know how to speak grammatically a long time before
they learn or even could learn grammar.
·
This talk of language games, finally, has
different levels. On one level we may
distinguish the Language itself, e.g. English, French, Arabic, Chinese. Within this language, as well as the language
spoken generally, there will be various specialized language games, e.g. the
carpentry game, the law game, football language, the scientific game, the
ethical game, the religious game. A
Language with its specialized language games may be compared to a medieval
city, with a rather disorganized centre of town, and much more organized modern
suburbs on the outskirts dependent on that centre for their origin and to some
extent for their continued life. On a
third level we may distinguish language uses within the general game or within
the various specialized games: the asking game, the promising game, the
praising or evaluating game, the reporting or describing game etc.
The consequence of this has been that Analytical
philosophers have become much more accepting, more concerned with what the
meaning is, more generally with how the language in context functions, than
with whether meaningful, e.g. with the religious language games. Philosophy should leave everything as it is,
to describe rather than to stand in judgement, Functional Analysis, don’t ask for meaning, ask for use. This describing however can sometimes be
difficult: expressions may mislead, sometimes you have to swim upstream. The
movement has in general become a lot less negative, no longer content with the
idea that philosophy is restricted to the task of correcting antecedent
confusion. Philosophy, as other
subjects, has tasks of its own. Even a
kind of metaphysics has come back into vogue, e.g. Strawson's 'descriptive
metaphysics'.
More
recent, i.e. post 2nd World War Analytical philosophers include: J.L. Austin,
Gilbert Ryle, P.F. Strawson, John Searle, Mary Warnock, Geoffrey Warnock,
Norman Malcolm, Elizabeth Anscombe and P.T. Geech, James Ross, Frederick
Ferre... --all influenced by the new Wittgenstein, some more than others. We may in general distinguish two brands:
Wittgensteinians, engaging in so-called 'Therapeutic Analysis' for the most
part, e.g. John Wisdom, G. A. Paul, M. Lazerowitz, Norman Malcolm, Elizabeth
Anscombe; and Ordinary Language Philosophy, coming out of Oxford (rather than
Cambridge) influenced by Wittgenstein but hardly disciples, and in certain
respects closer to G.E. Moore: e.g. J.L Austin, Gilbert Ryle, P. F. Strawson,
R. M. Hare, S. E. Toulmin, S. Hampshire, H. L. A. Hart, P. Nowell-Smith, Isaiah
Berlin, Antony Flew. But talk of schools
is becoming less and less useful; though people tend to know about and to
respond to what other people are writing usually in articles and philosophy can
at times become quite 'scholastic'.
Other names of note in the broad Linguistic
Analytic tradition include: Richard Rorty (he’s moved
on), Amelie Rorty, Harry Frankfurt, Hiliary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Michael
Dummett, Thomas Nagel, Annette Baier, Alisdair MacIntyre, John
Searle. There is also a rather strong
Philosophy of Religion contingent, including such people as Ninian Smart, Ian
T. Ramsey, James Ross, Frederick Ferre, John Hick, Richard Swinburne, Nelson
Pike (not only Philosophy of Religion) and a host of others more recently (esp.
Richard Alston). See General
Bibliography for some titles. Most of
these are still operating.
The tradition of analytic philosophy could safely
be ignored in social and political philosophy, until, that is, the publication
in 1971 of John Rawls, A Theory of
Justice (Harvard University Press,
In general, philosophical traditions worldwide
have become rather more blurred in the last twenty years or so. Courses in Linguistic Analysis are done in
Leuven/Louvain and Phenomenology courses have been run at Harvard and Yale as
well as Northwestern. Meanwhile, there
has also been a split in Analytic ranks between those who still think of
philosophy as capable of being 'scientific' and those who have given up on that
one and are resigned to philosophy as a more or less sophisticated and always
context dependent engagement in the 'conversation of humankind' about issues
that concern it. There are divisions between 'foundationalists' and
'non-foundationalists', even more roughly between moderns and advocates of
philosophical 'post-modernity' - esp. Richard Rorty, but also Alisdair
MacIntyre in philosophical ethics.
People are also much more liberal in respect of who they read and
dialogue with: serious philosophy on the European continent grafts the best of
English speaking philosophy into itself, cf. the examples of Paul Ricoeur and
Jurgen Habermas, and to some extent vice versa.
European philosophy, esp. Derrida, Foucault and French Feminists such as
Luce Iregaray, Julia Kristeva, Michele Le Doeuff, Elizabeth Cixous, meanwhile
has worked its way deeply into the human and social sciences, even in Australia
to a (to me) most surprising degree, without having anywhere near the same
effect on philosophy as done in university philosophy faculties. The latter tend to be still a bit particular
about the company they keep.
For more on the history of Linguistic Analysis,
see:
Twentieth-Century
Philosophy: The Analytic Tradition,
Warnock, G.
J. English
Philosophy Since 1900.
Charlesworth, Maxwell John. Philosophy and Linguistic Analysis.
Passmore, John. Recent Philosophers. Duckworth, 1985.
To get an idea of contemporary analytic philosophy
see:
The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Blackwell,
See also the tables of contents of typical
analytic philosophy journals, such as Philosophical
Studies, Mind, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and, for the most
part, Australasian Journal of Philosophy.