Schwartz’s A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: from Russell to Rawls: Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of Stephen P. Schwartz’s A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: from Russell to Rawls (2012) examines the philosophy of Quine and the critics of logical positivism.

After World War II, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and epistemology were strongly influenced by logical positivism. But already critics had emerged. First, at Oxford university, John Austin and Gilbert Ryle were developing their “ordinary language” philosophy which followed in the tradition of George E. Moore (1873–1958) and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) (Schwartz 2012: 77).

Very quickly, it came to be seen that the verifiability principle was too extreme and its own epistemological status was unclear (i.e., was it analytic or empirical?) (Schwartz 2012: 80).

Karl Popper, a critic of logical positivism, proposed an alternative epistemological system called critical rationalism to defend scientific knowledge, which nevertheless has been widely criticised in modern analytic philosophy (Musgrave 2004: 16–17). Popper argued that science uses the hypothetico-deductive method, with falsification (not verification) of hypotheses by empirical evidence the key to knowledge. In hypothetico-deduction, hypotheses are formed, predictions or conclusions are derived from hypotheses, and are then empirically tested, so that hypotheses can be falsified. Only hypotheses falsifiable in principle have a claim to be scientific (Schwartz 2012: 81).

In contrast to the logical positivists, however, Popper did not make his falsifiability principle a criterion for meaningfulness: what the falsifiability principle does is to demarcate scientific claims from metaphysical ones (and the latter may still be meaningful, but not scientific) (Schwartz 2012: 82).

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), an empiricist and broadly influenced by the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy (Schwartz 2012: 95), attacked the epistemological foundations of logical positivism. The paradox here is that Quine himself was an empiricist (Schwartz 2012: 95) – perhaps even a radical empiricist (Schwartz 2012: 95) – but he attacked logical positivism (which at the time was considered the most extreme “no nonsense” form of empiricist philosophy) as being contaminated by apriorist rationalism and metaphysics (Schwartz 2012: 77–78), most notably in its continuing adherence to a strict analytic versus synthetic distinction in epistemology.

The attack on analyticity was made in Quine’s famous article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) and later work. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” is often understood to have argued that the idea of analyticity (or the analytic nature of a proposition) cannot be made clear, and that definition of the term falls back on “synonymy” which in turn falls back on “analyticity,” and so is ultimately circular (Schwartz 2012: 84–85).

Nevertheless, I think Quine’s argument is unconvincing, not least of all because it is committed to an untenable verbal behaviourism. Schwartz (2012: 86) concludes that modern analytic philosophers continue to use the analytic versus synthetic distinction, but that they cannot do so with a “clear conscience,” a view which I think is unwarranted, since Quine never successfully overthrew the distinction nor the meaningful concept of analyticity.

Quine’s broader philosophy was a type of radical empiricism (Schwartz 2012: 95) or, as some have called it, a “hyperempiricism.” In brief, Quine’s view of philosophy can be summarised as follows:

(1) rejection of the strict analytic–synthetic distinction;

(2) an epistemological holism, or the view that totality of knowledge is a web of belief;

(3) a naturalised epistemology, or the view that the theory of knowledge is part of science and the question of how human beings form their beliefs is an issue for psychology (Schwartz 2012: 99–100);

(4) the Duhem–Quine thesis and the view that science is underdetermined (Schwartz 2012: 88–89);

(5) a view of the natural sciences as a useful tool for prediction;

(6) the idea of indeterminacy of radical translation, and

(7) the idea that philosophy is continuous with natural science, in the sense that even speculative metaphysics is part of the human web of belief, but it is ultimately an empirical question for science (Schwartz 2012: 96–99).

Quine sees all knowledge as in principle capable of revision, even logic and mathematics (Schwartz 2012: 88).

Many also think that Quine’s epistemological holism and his use of the Duhem–Quine thesis have been confirmed by Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) (Schwartz 2012: 91).

Quine’s version of pragmatism inspired a number of later American philosophers, including the neo-pragmatists Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam (Schwartz 2012: 101).

Links
“Willard van Orman Quine,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2010 (rev. 2010)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/

Robert Sinclair, “Quine’s Philosophy of Science,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009
http://www.iep.utm.edu/quine-sc/

Chase B. Wrenn, “Naturalistic Epistemology,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005
http://www.iep.utm.edu/nat-epis/

Stefanie Rocknak, “Quine on the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013
http://www.iep.utm.edu/quine-an/

“Naturalized Epistemology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2001
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-naturalized/

“Underdetermination of Scientific Theory,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/

“Karl Popper,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1997 (rev. 2013)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/

John R. Wettersten, “Karl Popper and Critical Rationalism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007
http://www.iep.utm.edu/cr-ratio/

“Falsifiability,” Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Musgrave, A. E. 2004. “How Popper (might have) Solved the Problem of Induction,” in P. Catton and G. Macdonald (eds), Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, England. 16–27.

Schwartz, Stephen P. 2012. A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.

Schwartz’s A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: from Russell to Rawls: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of Stephen P. Schwartz’s A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: from Russell to Rawls (2012) examines the logical positivists and early Wittgenstein.

The Vienna Circle (or Ernst Mach Society) was a group of German-speaking scientists, mathematicians and philosophers based around the University of Vienna from 1922 until the mid-1930s, and included the following:

Moritz Schlick (1882–1936)
Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), from 1926
Otto Neurath (1882–1945)
Friedrich Waismann (1896–1959)
Gustav Bergmann (1906–1987)
Hans Hahn (1879–1934)
Victor Kraft (1880–1975)
Karl Menger (1902–1985)
Philipp Frank (1884–1966)
Marcel Natkin
Olga Hahn-Neurath (1882-1937)
Theodor Radakovic

Associates
Herbert Feigl
Kurt Gödel

Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Carnap wrote the manifesto of the Vienna Circle in 1929, but, as noted above, the group had existed since 1922.

The members of the Vienna Circle had drawn inspiration from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–1951) book the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logical-Philosophical Treatise), which was first published in German in 1921, and then in an English translation prepared in Cambridge of 1922.

From 1926, Wittgenstein himself attended meetings of the Vienna Circle, although relations were not exactly amicable, not only because Wittgenstein did not get along with Rudolf Carnap (Schwartz 2012: 51), but also because of philosophical disagreements.

The importance of the Tractatus (as it is usually called) lies in the realm of philosophy of language, how language represents the world (Schwartz 2012: 52), and particularly in the picture theory of meaning. While the world is composed of all kinds of things and states of affairs, our language represents reality, and there is a fundamental structure embodied in formal logic that gives us an isomorphic relationship between our language (which we use in thought) and reality (Schwartz 2012: 52).

A simple and independent, or “atomic,” proposition represents a simple fact about the world, and larger complex or compound propositions are built up out of the truth functions of atomic propositions (Schwartz 2012: 53).

The fundamental logical concepts we call tautologies and self-contradictions are recognisable by the formal use of truth tables (Schwartz 2012: 53). Wittgenstein thought that tautologies are without meaning in the sense that they contain no new information (Schwartz 2012: 53). Thus the necessary truth they provide is “empty and formal,” so that Wittgenstein also saw mathematics as being tautological (Schwartz 2012: 53–54).

Wittgenstein also held that the “totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science,” so that philosophy itself is not science, but merely a technique aiming at “logical clarification of thoughts” (Schwartz 2012: 58).

The upshot of all this was the epistemologically revolutionary view (at least at the time) that analytic propositions, while they are certain, are tautologies and provide no informative new knowledge (Schwartz 2012: 54). This view invigorated the radical empiricism of the Vienna Circle, and led to the emergence of logical positivism.

The logical positivists came to think that there are ultimately two sources of human knowledge: (1) logical reasoning (yielding analytic a priori knowledge) and (2) empirical experience (yielding synthetic a posteriori knowledge). Like Frege, they rejected the existence of Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge, and saw mathematics as analytic tautologies (Schwartz 2012: 61).

The unusual twist in logical positivist epistemology is the verification criterion of meaningfulness, which, in the form stated by Ayer, holds that any non-analytic proposition must be empirically verifiable, either in practice or at least in principle, to be meaningful (Schwartz 2012: 60–61). If a proposition is not verifiable, then it is meaningless or without cognitive content. The logical positivists used the verification principles to reject metaphysics, theology and ethics as meaningless (Schwartz 2012: 61), a rather extreme view to say the least.

At the heart of the logical positivist program was the belief that many of the traditional issues of metaphysics are just confusions caused by improper use or misunderstanding of language (Schwartz 2012: 63). One of the most important of these confusions was the idea that existence is a property, when it is not a property at all, but simply expressed by the logic of quantifiers (Schwartz 2012: 63).

Logical positivism was spread to the English-speaking world by A. J. Ayer in his now classic book Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). Ayer had visited the Vienna Circle in 1933, and learned the principles of the logical positivists, though perhaps oversimplified them in process (Schwartz 2012: 59).

Ayer’s logical positivism had these seven tenets:

(1) that metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics are meaningless by the verification principle;

(2) metaphysical issues are pseudo-problems caused by unclear or informal and misleading use of language;

(3) logic and mathematics are formal truths but tautologies;

(4) all propositions are divided into two classes: (i) analytic, a priori and necessarily true, but tautologous, and (ii) synthetic, a posteriori and contingent;

(5) the idea that all science forms a single unified system, and social sciences use the same methods as the natural sciences;

(6) reductionism (either phenomenalist or physicalist), and

(7) that ethical statements have no cognitive content, but express attitudes and emotions (Schwartz 2012: 61–67).

After the 1930s, however, many of the leading logical positivists came to modify or reject many of their core beliefs, and other philosophers such as the later Wittgenstein and the “ordinary language” philosophers at Oxford came to attack its principles (Schwartz 2012: 69).

Curiously, in 1932 – the year before Ayer’s own visit to Vienna – Willard Van Orman Quine had also visited the logical positivists, but, while Ayer was to become a leading exponent of logical positivism, Quine emerged after WWII as a severe critic.

Links
“Ludwig Wittgenstein,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2002 (rev. 2009)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/

Duncan J. Richter, “Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004
http://www.iep.utm.edu/wittgens/

“Vienna Circle,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006 (rev. 2011),
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vienna-circle/

Mauro Murzi, “Vienna Circle,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004
http://www.iep.utm.edu/viennacr/

“Logical Empiricism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011 (rev. 2011)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/

Mauro Murzi, “Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2001
http://www.iep.utm.edu/carnap/

“Moritz Schlick,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlick/

“Russell’s Logical Atomism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005 (rev. 2009)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-atomism/

“Wittgenstein’s Logical Atomism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004 (rev. 2013)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-atomism/

“Logical Atomism,” Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_fact

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ayer, A. J. 1936. Language, Truth, and Logic. Gollancz Ltd, London.

Schwartz, Stephen P. 2012. A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.

Schwartz’s A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls: Chapter 1

Stephen P. Schwartz’s A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: from Russell to Rawls (2012) is very useful treatment of the origin and development of modern Anglo-American analytic philosophy, and is one of a number of recent general histories of the subject (see Beaney 2013; Glock 2008; Martinich and Sosa 2006; Stroll 2000; Soames 2003a; and Soames 2003b).

The background that Schwartz provides in Chapter 1 of his book actually illuminates Keynes’s own early philosophical ideas and the context of Keynes’s famous A Treatise on Probability (1921). I sketch the main points of Chapter 1 from Schwartz’s study in what follows.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was the founder of analytic philosophy, but he drew on important work in mathematical logic by the German Gottlob Frege (1848–1925).

Russell and George E. Moore (1873–1958), another founder of analytic philosophy, attended Cambridge University in the 1890s, and came under the influence of British Hegelian philosophers.

Russell went through a number of philosophical phases as follows:

(1) a period of influence from British idealism;

(2) a period of Platonist realism (1901–1904);

(3) the period of logical realism (1905–1912), and

(4) the period of logical atomism (1913–1918).

When Moore and Russell broke with Idealism, they had a brief flirtation with Platonic realism (Schwartz 2012: 28), and then Russell moved towards “logical atomism,” which is recognisably an early form of analytic philosophy.

In 1903, two important books appeared. Both of these works profoundly influenced the young John Maynard Keynes. The first (and most important to Keynes) was Moore’s Principia Ethica, an influential treatise on ethics; the second was Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1903) (written in the latter’s Platonic realist phase).

Russell’s book was concerned with the foundations of mathematics, and in it Russell argued that mathematics could be deduced from a very small number of principles, a view which is the hallmark of the philosophy of mathematics called logicism.

But the ground for Russell’s logicist interpretation of mathematics had already been laid by Gottlob Frege in his Begriffsschrift (1879), Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (The Foundations of Arithmetic; 1884), and the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic; vol. 1: 1893; vol. 2: 1903), in which works Frege founded modern logic and argued against Kant’s view that arithmetic statements were synthetic a priori knowledge. Against this Kantian view, Frege held that arithmetic was analytic a priori, and tried to demonstrate how a new logic could be used to deduce mathematics from a set of given axioms.

Russell’s early work uncovered a flaw in Frege’s system called Russell’s paradox, but Russell continued his work in the 1900s in an attempt to solve this paradox and complete Frege’s vision.

Russell and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) worked on the culmination of their logicist program in mathematics, the three-volume book Principia Mathematica (the volumes of which were published in 1910, 1912, and 1913 respectively). In the Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead attempted to construct a set of axioms and rules by means of symbolic logic from which all mathematics could be proven.

Though it is generally thought that Russell’s strict logicist program failed (given the problems raised by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems), nevertheless the consensus today is still that most of classical mathematics can be derived from pure logic and set theory (Schwartz 2012: 19), so in one important respect the essence of Russell’s logicist program was successful.

Thus the main legacy of Russell’s logicism was the rejection of Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge. For after it was shown that mathematics was not an example of synthetic a priori knowledge, one of the greatest arguments made by Rationalist apriorists was undercut and refuted.

Another influence that Russell’s logicism had was on John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s own “logical theory of probability” was itself a logicist attempt to put probability and inductive inference on a sound footing by using a system of formal logic (Gillies 2000: 27). It is notable that Russell himself was deeply involved in helping Keynes with his work on probability (Gillies 2000: 27), although the initial inspiration for Keynes’s work on probability came from Moore’s Principia Ethica (Gillies 2000: 28).

The other major philosophical achievement of Russell covered by Schwartz is Russell’s article “On Denoting” (Mind 14 [1905]: 479–493), a landmark in the analytic philosophy of language. In this, Russell developed a theory of “definite descriptions,” or phrases that pick out one specific object, such as the “30th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom” or “my copy of Keynes’s General Theory.” These are distinguished from proper names, and philosophical problems arise when definite descriptions refer to non-existent objects, such as “the present king of France” or the “current president of Canada,” and propositions such as “the present king of France is bald.”

For Russell, these “definite description” propositions were merely informal ways of expressing existential statements: for example, the proposition “the present king of France is bald” is really to be understood as “there is one and only one present king of France and that one is bald” (Schwartz 2012: 24). Such existential statements are clearly false in terms of their truth value, so that Russell was able to reject the questionable theory of definite descriptions developed by Meinong (Schwartz 2012: 23).

By the time Russell turned to actual philosophy in the 1910s, he continued the British empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume (Schwartz 2012: 34), and modern analytic philosophy, for better or worse, has continued largely to shun both Hegelianism and modern Continental philosophy.


Links
“Bertrand Russell,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1995 (rev. 2010)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/

Carey, Rosalind. “Russell’s Metaphysics,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008
http://www.iep.utm.edu/russ-met/

Klement, Kevin C. “Russell’s Paradox ,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005
http://www.iep.utm.edu/par-russ/

“Gottlob Frege,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1995 (rev. 2012)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frege/

Klement, Kevin C. “Gottlob Frege (1848–1925),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005
http://www.iep.utm.edu/frege/

“Frege’s Theorem and Foundations for Arithmetic,” 1998 (rev. 2013)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frege-logic/

Lotter, Dorothea. “Frege and Language,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005
http://www.iep.utm.edu/freg-lan/

“Philosophy of Mathematics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007 (rev. 2012)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/

“Principia Mathematica,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1996 (rev. 2010)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/principia-mathematica/

“Logicism,” Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicism

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beaney, Michael. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Gillies, Donald. 2000. Philosophical Theories of Probability. Routledge, London and New York.

Glock, Hans-Johann. 2008. What is Analytic Philosophy?. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York.

Keynes, John Maynard. 1921. A Treatise on Probability. Macmillan, London.

Martinich, A. P. and David Sosa (eds.). 2006. A Companion to Analytic Philosophy. Blackwell, Malden, Mass. and Oxford.

Preston, Aaron. 2012. Review of Stephen P. Schwartz, A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/36378-a-brief-history-of-analytic-philosophy-from-russell-to-rawls/

Russell, Bertrand. 1905. “On Denoting,” Mind 14: 479–493.

Schwartz, Stephen P. 2012. A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.

Soames, Scott. 2003a. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. The Age of Meaning. Volume 2. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. and Oxford.

Soames, Scott. 2003b. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. The Dawn of Analysis. Volume 1. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. and Oxford.

Stroll, Avrum. 2000. Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy. Columbia University Press, New York.