Race, Gender, and the History of Early Analytic Philosophy. Matt LaVine
slippage in, and disagreement about, usage of the term “analytic philosophy” itself. Given that one of the pieces of consensus that exists about analytic philosophy is that clarity has been greatly important to it, we should spend some time getting clear on the meaning of the phrase “analytic philosophy.” And, from my perspective, one of the most important things to recognize is that this term is ambiguous between multiple different readings. This, unfortunately, creates the potential for merely verbal disputes when people are debating the understanding of the larger history of analytic philosophy. That is to say, it creates the possibility that two people think they are disagreeing about the historical facts, when they are really just using the phrase “analytic philosophy” differently in their utterances. To see this, we will use a standard test for ambiguity of showing that there exist sentence types such that one token of the type is true and one token is false.
To get to such sentence types, we will begin with another piece of the small consensus that exists in the subfield of the history of analytic philosophy. Given that there is some general agreement that it is difficult to characterize the meaning(s) of “analytic philosophy,” one of the common places that meta-philosophers and historians start such discussions is simply by listing those they take to be paradigm cases of analytic philosophers. Interestingly, despite much agreement on these lists, there are some figures that have become something of standard problem cases as well. In particular, Gottlob Frege is squarely in the extension for some and squarely out of the extension of “analytic philosopher” for others. As representative examples, Schwartz says, “I do not consider [Frege, Godel, Tarski, Turing, and Chomsky] to be analytic philosophers” (Schwartz 2012, 7), but Klement that “Frege has become so influential that it is almost unthinkable that any reasonably comprehensive history [of analytic philosophy] would omit him” (Klement 2014).
Interestingly, while Schwartz does not include Frege as an analytic philosopher, he agrees with Klement on the influence of Frege—discussing him on no fewer than forty-six pages, more than Anscombe, Austin, and Ayer, among others. So, in a certain sense, they agree on the facts of the matter with respect to Frege and analytic philosophy. They simply disagree on whether or not those facts make it the case that “analytic philosophy” applies to Frege’s work. One reason for this could be that they are using the term “analytic philosophy” with different meanings and one makes the following sentence true, while the other makes it false:
(1) “Gottlob Frege was an analytic philosopher.”
Of course, another explanation may be that they are after one and the same concept with “analytic philosophy,” they simply have different conceptions of it, which make them disagree on whether or not Frege belongs in the extension. A third could be that, again, they are after the same meaning, they are just working with a vague meaning.
To see a related example that I think speaks against these alternative explanations, consider the sentence:
(2) “Bernard Bolzano was an analytic philosopher.”
Prior to the work of Haller (1988), Dummett (1993), and Smith (1994), very few would have thought this was anything but clearly false. Since the groundbreaking work of Lapointe (2011), many more tend to think that it is true. This is because Lapointe makes clear that Bolzano “anticipated ground-breaking ideas such as the (Fregean) distinction between sense and reference, the (Tarskian) notion of logical consequence and the (Quinean) definition of logical truth” (Lapointe 2011, 6). As she argued several years later, these and “other Bolzanian theoretical innovations . . . warrant his inclusion in the analytical tradition” (Lapointe 2014, 96). That said, in Michael Beaney’s editor’s foreword to Lapointe’s book, he says that “[d]espite these similarities, however, Bolzano had no direct influence on any of the acknowledged founders of analytic philosophy.” So, rather than being a part of the analytic tradition, “[Bolzano’s] philosophy—like his life—can be seen as offering a bridge between Kant’s seminal work and the birth of analytic philosophy” (Lapointe 2011, ix—Beaney’s foreword).
Here, I think Lapointe claims that (2) is true and Beaney that it’s false because they are using the term “analytic philosophy” differently. For Lapointe, that “analytic philosopher” applies to Bolzano has to do with the way he did philosophy—namely, that he anticipated the use of tools from the philosophy of language (e.g., the sense/reference distinction) and logic (e.g., logical consequence and truth). For Beaney, he does not disagree with respect to Bolzano’s role in the development of these linguistic and logical innovations, but rather suggests that “analytic philosopher” fails to apply to Bolzano because of a lack of direct lines of influence to paradigmatic analytic philosophers. In the first case, “analytic philosophy” seems to be connected to a particular philosophical method—one that places the philosophy of language and logic at the center of philosophizing. This would be natural as the linguistic turn, an event that made philosophy of language first philosophy, has been connected to analytic philosophy for a long time. Furthermore, the use of, and/or response to, the “new logic” of the nineteenth century, which superseded classical logic, has long been thought to be a defining feature of analytic philosophy. In the second case, though, “analytic philosophy” is not connected to just the use of a certain philosophical method (or methods). Rather, one needs to be connected to that particular movement within the history of philosophy, which was founded by thinkers like G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to count as an analytic philosopher.
Here we have the basis for two different meanings, which make good on the claim that “analytic philosophy” is an ambiguous term. On the one hand, it is sometimes used to refer to a style or method of doing philosophy, one which focuses on philosophy of language and logic. This is what is meant when people talk of philosophical analysis, analytic methods, and the like. This is also how it can be seriously said that “Leibniz would be the first modern analytical philosopher” (Sebestik 1997, 34). On the other hand, “analytic philosophy” is sometimes used to refer to a specific movement within the larger history of philosophy, which is defined by lines of direct influence emanating out from thinkers like Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein. This is what is meant when people talk of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, the analytic/continental divide, and the like. One subsidiary goal of the book is to explain why this ambiguity has been missed5—namely, one of the defining features of the early phase of that social-intellectual movement was a great hope for that method in its relation to philosophical/scientific progress and their connection to human progress.
For now, I provide just a few more examples of sentences that speak toward this claimed ambiguity. For instance, consider the following two sentences:
(3) “Analytic philosophy may have started coming to an end in the 1970’s.”
(4) “Analytic philosophy requires logical and/or linguistic analysis.”
While many philosophers today would be very surprised to hear somebody utter (3), something like it has been put forth by a number of prominent philosophers, whose work was collected together for an edited volume by John Rajchman and Cornel West with the suggestive title, Post-analytic Philosophy (Rajchman & West 1985). A number of these post-analytic philosophers come very close to something like (3) with thoughts such as “I think that analytic philosophy culminates in Quine, the later Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson—which is to say that it transcends and cancels itself” (Rorty 1982, xviii) and “at the very moment when analytical philosophy is recognized as the ‘dominant movement’ in world philosophy, analytical philosophy has come to the end of its own project—the dead end, not the completion” (Putnam 1985, 28). Again, I claim that the explanation for this disagreement is that we have a merely verbal dispute. Those focusing on a potential truth expressed by (3) are noticing the fact that something significant in analytic philosophy—the historical movement—changed in the early 1970s, while those denying (3) are focusing on the fact that not much about the use of analytic philosophy—the method—changed here.
Something similar goes on with (4), as precisely how seriously to take, or how to understand, the “analysis” that is cognate to “analytic philosophy” has also been a point of contention. As Glock has argued, “many contemporary explanations of what analytic philosophy is are curiously silent on the