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Analytic philosophy wasn’t what you might have been led to think it was. This is something that Aaron Preston suspects the canonical analytics – Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – knew, but were inclined to paper over. At any rate, it is something that the “new wave” historians of analytic philosophy (Preston’s term) in the 1980s and 1990s, e.g., Michael Beaney, Nicholas Griffin, Peter Hacker, Peter Hylton, and Ray Monk, established and made much of. With a recent spate of “analytic historians” (Preston’s term again) like Scott Soames writing the history of analytic philosophy in seeming ignorance of the work of the new wavers, Preston is rightly concerned to remind us of the new wavers’ chief result, namely, that “no view traditionally connected with analytic philosophy was actually shared by all and only canonical analysts” (15). Analytic philosophers, especially the canonical ones, differed over what analysis is, what gets analyzed, and, for that matter, what the point of the entire enterprise might be. Preston’s paper is, however, no mere reminder to keep some Monk nearby while wading through, say, Soames’ Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. According to Preston, the new wavers saw something important, indeed, but failed to see what that something implied. The fact that Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein (not to mention A. J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap, Gottlob Frege, etc.) did not see eye to eye on the nature and role of analysis, combined with a bit of thought about what a philosophical school is, forces us, according to Preston, to what he calls an “illusionist” view of analytic philosophy. On the illusionist approach, analytic philosophy is what it has traditionally been supposed to be, but, alas, it does not exist. (Did it seem to you that it existed? There’s the illusion.) This is a view denied by the new wavers, though according to Preston, it follows from their work. More on the illusionist approach, and Preston’s arguments for it, in a bit. First, a distinction. The discovery that no single doctrine is shared by analytic philosophy’s canonical philosophers could well unsettle someone who has devoted his or her best intellectual years to imbibing, and building on, the analytic tradition. But it shouldn’t, at least not if we keep in mind the simple distinction between an idea on the one hand and the people who consider, examine, hold, resist, or flat-out reject it on the other. There are many ways a person can be involved with a particular idea at a particular time beyond simply believing it. Consider the flux of these various attitudes for one person over time, multiply that by the several members of an intellectual community, and the diversity of intellectual attitudes to a given idea begins to seem the norm in an intellectual community – uniformity, even for short periods, the exception. The appearance of uniformity is, of course, another thing. That, as Preston notes, is appreciated and projected by intellectual communities, philosophical schools hardly being an exception.1 In short, doctrine should not be called upon to serve as the basis for defining a philosophical school, at least if our aim is to pick out its canonical figures. Doctrinal definitions of the analytic movement, particularly, would describe a “movement” whose membership vacillated dramatically, with “canonical” figures dropping in and out as their thought developed or as they merely revisited views they’d earlier defended, attacked, or ignored. That is, indeed, just what new wavers taught us. But it hardly means that certain ideas are not at the heart of analytic philosophy, or that there is no such thing as analytic philosophy. Consider, for example, the idea that many (or even every) exemplary philosophical problem is artificial, a sort of tangle enabled by nothing more than our normal language, or perhaps our misuse of it. That is a profound and fascinating idea, absolutely central to analytic philosophy and worth thinking hard about even today. But to define analytic philosophy in terms of a commitment, conviction, or belief in that idea would be to miss its development, its reconsideration and reformulations in various hands – in short, to miss the history of analytic philosophy at its most significant and exciting. What makes new wave history of analytic philosophy so appealing (to me at least) is not that it disables the popular image of analytic philosophy as a doctrinally unified school, but that it attempts to trace the development, in different heads across different times, of the very doctrines once taken to be analytic philosophy’s defining features.2 Inclined to define analytic philosophy (for the sake, presumably, of having a fixed historical target), and impressed that no doctrine picks out just the right people at the right time, one would presumably be in the market for a non-doctrinal definition. Big mistake, says Preston, and here we return to the matter of implications and illusions. According to Preston, what the new wavers missed is that we must have a doctrinal definition of analytic philosophy, and among those the only viable candidate is illusionist. Here’s the argument. Why, first, must we have a doctrinal definition, especially if (as Preston accepts) the new wavers have shown that there is no single doctrine the canonical figures share? Well, in defining analytic philosophy (or, presumably, any philosophical school) we must demand a “real definition,” one that picks out analytic philosophy by its essence, its necessary and sufficient conditions (20). That’s the first premise. Second premise: philosophy is and always has been a “theoretical discipline”; it produces “sets of views about the way things are” which are “verbally articulated in a relatively straightforward way, in the form of a sufficiently clear declarative sentence” (20-1). Therefore the only acceptable sort of definition of any school of philosophy, analytic philosophy included, is one that identifies the school by way of its doctrine: There is a minimum standard, a necessary condition, for the initial formation and the retrospective demarcation of groups that, like schools, movements, or traditions, purport to mark out not merely a region of social space, but of philosophical space: such groups must rely for their cohesion, and hence also their existence, on a kind of unity that is constituted by agreement in theoretical matters. That is, a group is most properly called a philosophical school (etc.) only when it has come together on the basis of a shared philosophical view (or some set of them). (21, emphasis in original) Philosophical schools like analytic philosophy must be defined doctrinally because, in short, definitions capture essences, and philosophical schools are essentially shared doctrines. There’s a problem here, though, in that anyone dubious about the conclusion, demanding as it does that we have a doctrinal definition of analytic philosophy, will be at least as dubious about the argument’s second and all-important premise that philosophical schools are essentially shared doctrines. That second premise asserts, after all, the content of the conclusion, and so the argument appears to beg the question. Granted the first premise, the question of whether we can fashion something other than a doctrinal definition of analytic philosophy just is the question of whether analytic philosophy in particular is, in essence, a set of doctrines. That aside, the second premise, that philosophy (again, including analytic philosophy) is “the production and critical assessment” of “sets of views … about the way things are, or what is the case, in some region or other – or possibly the whole – of reality,” (21) (something Preston claims is a “minimal conception of what philosophy is and what it involves [that] has been widely held, at least implicitly, throughout the history of the discipline”) was in fact explicitly denied by, for example, assorted logical positivists, notably Carnap. Carnap, with a number of positivists, saw himself not as offering claims about the world, but as fashioning tools for the analysis of language. The tools themselves, in the form of formal languages, were developed in the context of, typically, pure syntax; they were analytic, and thus made no claims about the world. Carnap’s logical syntax program, and the nature of philosophy itself, was of course discussed, contested, and modified at the time, but that, as we saw above, is to be expected. We should not, therefore, be swayed by Preston’s argument for a doctrinal definition of analytic philosophy; its force depends upon an antecedent commitment to its conclusion via its second premise, and its second premise conflicts with what we know to be the case about at least one prominent strain of analytic philosophy. But this hardly squelches the curiosity we ought to have about Preston’s illusionist view. What sort of definition of analytic philosophy could this be, and how could it be doctrinal, given what we’ve learned from the new wavers? According to Preston, the “received” view of analytic philosophy is the view that “analytic philosophy is a school of philosophy that originated … around the turn of the twentieth-century … fueled by the perception that the correct method of philosophical inquiry … was the analysis of language.” However, he continues, it “does not correspond and never has corresponded to anything in reality” (14-5, 27). This idea, that the received view is only an illusion, Preston calls “illusionism.” Illusionism adheres to new waver history; there wasn’t, in fact, any such thing as analytic philosophy. But what the illusionist takes analytic philosophy to be ... what it is that there wasn’t any of, as it were – is just what traditional definitions have made it out to be, that is, the received view. So, says Preston, “the illusionist is a traditionalist concerning what analytic philosophy is supposed to be, but differs from other traditionalists concerning whether analytic philosophy exists at all” (27). One is reminded of other mythical beasts, say, unicorns, about which we are all apparently illusionists in Preston’s sense. We all subscribe to a traditionalist definition of unicorns but deny that there are any. Anyone who claims otherwise is suffering from, or perpetrating, an illusion. This is good as far as it goes, except wasn’t it part of the traditionalist account of analytic philosophy that analytic philosophy existed, that is, that there were analytic philosophers, properly named as such because they in fact belonged to a philosophical school? One suspects that there is in Preston’s account of his position an equivocation over ‘philosophical school’. Actually, there must be some equivocation, for otherwise what Preston says about the illusionist view is flatly inconsistent. He writes that “for the illusionist analytic philosophy is exactly what the received view says it is,” (27) and (earlier) that on the received view, “analytic philosophy is a school of philosophy” (14). So on the illusionist view analytic philosophy is a school. But we also read that if “analytic philosophy as ordinarily conceived is an illusion, then it is not a philosophical school” (27). At this point, really, we can only ask for clarification of what is meant by ‘philosophical school’ or, barring that, consider the possibility that the illusionist approach is itself an illusion. Preston’s approach to these issues in the history of analytic philosophy is thoughtful and creative, and so these problems might steer us back toward non-doctrinal definitions of analytic philosophy. Or, even better, it might lead us to ask what work a definition of analytic philosophy, in any of these senses, does for us, and why we need one to begin with. Quine was fond of noting that the advent, development, and ultimate calcification of definitions is an accurate measure of progress in the sciences. Perhaps just the opposite holds for the history of philosophy?
* Thanks to Aaron Preston for helpful comments on an earlier draft of these comments. 1 For a remarkable (and entertaining) example of the projection of unity over the fact of disunity in a movement still regarded (despite much research establishing the contrary) as an exemplar of philosophical uniformity, see Paolo Mancuso’s account of the Vienna Circle’s reaction to Alfred Tarski’s theory of truth, “Tarski, Neurath and Kokoszynska on the Semantic Conception of Truth” (forthcoming in D. Patterson, New Essays on Tarski and Philosophy, Oxford). Faced with disagreement among logical positivists over the acceptability of Tarski’s theory of truth, Carnap, Mancuso recounts, directed participants to “take a waiting attitude and ... not carry out public polemics against semantics as a whole until ... further development.” 2 An appreciation of the role of what Thomas Gieryn has, in the context of the history and sociology of science, called “boundary work” is extremely useful here. See Gieryn, T. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Department of Philosophy |