Page 48 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
pressed by the adjunction of subject and predicate rather than by a copula, there would be any terms equivalent to 'entity,' 'essence,' or 'essentiality.' But Hobbes's account of political obligation was not lin- guistic: a citizen's obligation to obey the law, he thought, arises out of the social contract that all citi- zens make with one another to obey a sovereign who will protect them. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, a more comprehensively linguistic approach to philosophy was encouraged or de- veloped, along at least seven different, though inter- related, lines.
1. Linguistic Approaches to Philosophy
1.1 Frege's (1893) and Russell's (1903) Project for the Reduction of Mathematics to Logic
In this project, all arithmetical concepts were to be defined hi terms of logical ones and all arithmetical truths were to be shown provable from logical ones. Thus the correct philosophy of mathematics was to be rigorously and conclusively demonstrated. The project itself encountered a number of deep-seated difficulties; but it nevertheless inspired many phil- osophers to think it worthwhile exploring the possi- bilities of exact formal-logical analysis in regard to other areas of language use. Among such searches for logically ideal languages or language fragments, one could list Carnap's (1951) work on the measurement of inductive support, von Wright's (1951) on the logic of obligation, Hempel's on the structure of scientific explanation, Hintikka's (1962) on the relations be- tween knowledge and belief, Prior's (1957) on the role of verb tense in statements about past, present, and future, Plantinga's (1974) on the nature of necessity, and so on. Not all these writers have confined them- selves to the linguistic method of philosophizing; but they all contributed towards exploring its possibilities.
1.2 Moore's Minute Analysis of His Contemporaries' Writings (e.g., Bradley, Russell, Stout)
By exposing layer after layer of ambiguity in another philosopher's statements, G. E. Moore (1922) dis- sected the apparently tenable from the apparently untenable in ways that seldom failed to leave his mark on the problem. He thus introduced strikingly higher levels of rigor into the discussion of important ques- tions in epistemology and metaphysics, such as issues about sense data or other minds, where formal-logical techniques of analysis, like those practiced by Frege and Russell on mathematical issues, are inappropriate or unproductive. And, as his work demonstrated the value of discussing philosophical issues in a more pre- cise linguistic style, it was natural to believe that a certain type of philosophical analysis consisted in just such discussion. Indeed, where it turns out that the only justifiable conclusions about these issues are of relatively little interest, the achievement of precision, rather than the truth of what is made precise, becomes
the principal objective in view. So, among many who attended Moore's lectures at Cambridge, or read his articles, philosophy became the critique of language. But Moore himself never explicitly endorsed such a conception of philosophy, and he was quite ready on occasion to philosophize in a nonlinguistic mode, as when he argued that the most valuable things imagin- able are the pleasures of personal affection and the enjoyment of beautiful objects (1903). He also (1942: 660-67) explicitly rejected the view that philosophy should be concerned with the meanings of verbal expressions as distinct from the analysis of concepts or propositions.
1.3 Wittgenstein's Claim (1922) that the Purpose of Philosophy is the Logical Clarification of Thoughts
Philosophy, on this view, is not a theory but an activity, and the result of philosophy is not a number of philosophical propositions but just to make prop- ositions clear. In his later work (1953), Wittgenstein retained his opposition to philosophical 'theories' while stressing the enormous variety of ways in which language functions and the role which it plays in cre- ating philosophical puzzlement. Legitimate progress is then to be made only by assembling detailed examples, without making any generalizations. Such a view of philosophy, however, also cuts itself off from the right to articulate the professed conception of philosophy in general terms. As a consequence, Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy is more easily seen to promote discussion of Wittgenstein's own intentions and achievements than to encourage imitation. However, Schlick (1930); Waismann (1965); Malcolm (1972), and others have acknowledged their debt to his con- ception of philosophy, and the details of his arguments on particular issues have been widely influential.
1.4 A View of the Characteristic Task of Philosophy
Ayer (1936), Ryle (1949), Hare (1952), and others held the view that philosophy has as its characteristic task the explicit analysis of conceptual thought. Phil- osophy, so conceived, differs on the one side from the study of the facts about which people think and on the other from the psychological study of the processes of thinking. Its distinctive objects are best seen as the meanings of the words, phrases, or sentences that express the thoughts to be analyzed. It is often occu- pied with mismatches between the superficial gram- matical appearance of a sentence and its underlying logical form or conceptual structure. Thus Ryle (1949), for example, argued that those who ask how a person's mind is related to his body are makingwhat he called a 'category-mistake': they are treating the word 'mind' as if it belongs to the same, locatable- entity category as the word 'body'; they are treating the word 'vanity' as if it belongs to the same category as 'feeling'; and so on. Similarly, legitimate areas of philosophical puzzlement about knowledge, say, or
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