Analyticity (New Problems of Philosophy)

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A few of the most important and active topics and subtopics of analytic philosophy are summarized by the following sections. Motivated by the logical positivists' interest in verificationism, logical behaviorism was the most prominent theory of mind of analytic philosophy for the first half of the 20th century.

Behaviorism later became much less popular, in favor of type physicalism or functionalism , theories that identified mental states with brain states. During this period, topics of the philosophy of mind were often related strongly to topics of cognitive science such as modularity or innateness. Finally, analytic philosophy has featured a certain number of philosophers who were dualists , and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence; the most prominent representative is David Chalmers.

John Searle suggests that the obsession with the philosophy of language during the 20th century has been superseded by an emphasis on the philosophy of mind , [28] in which functionalism is currently the dominant theory. In recent years, a central focus of research in the philosophy of mind has been consciousness. While there is a general consensus for the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, [29] there are many opinions as to the specifics. The best known theories are Daniel Dennett 's heterophenomenology , Fred Dretske and Michael Tye 's representationalism , and the higher-order theories of either David M.

Philosophers working with the analytic tradition have gradually come to distinguish three major types of moral philosophy. The first half of the 20th century was marked by skepticism toward, and neglect of, normative ethics. Related subjects, such as social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of history , became only marginal topics of English-language philosophy during this period. During this time, utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical type of ethics to remain popular. However, as the influence of logical positivism began to decrease mid-century, analytic philosophers had renewed interest in ethics.

Anscombe 's " Modern Moral Philosophy " sparked a revival of Aristotle 's virtue ethical approach and John Rawls 's A Theory of Justice restored interest in Kantian ethical philosophy. Today, contemporary normative ethics is dominated by three schools: Twentieth-century meta-ethics has two origins. The first is G. Moore's investigation into the nature of ethical terms e.

The second is in logical positivism and its attitude that statements which are unverifiable are meaningless. Although that attitude was adopted originally to promote scientific investigation by rejecting grand metaphysical systems, it had the side effect of making ethical and aesthetic value judgments as well as religious statements and beliefs meaningless. But because value judgments are of major importance in human life, it became incumbent on logical positivism to develop an explanation of the nature and meaning of value judgements. As a result, analytic philosophers avoided normative ethics, and instead began meta-ethical investigations into the nature of moral terms, statements, and judgments.

The logical positivists opined that statements about value —- including all ethical and aesthetic judgments—- are non-cognitive ; that is, they cannot be objectively verified or falsified. Instead, the logical positivists adopted an emotivist theory, which was that value judgments expressed the attitude of the speaker.

For example, in this view, saying, "Killing is wrong", is equivalent to saying, "Boo to murder", or saying the word "murder" with a particular tone of disapproval. While non-cognitivism was generally accepted by analytic philosophers, emotivism had many deficiencies, and evolved into more sophisticated non-cognitivist theories such as the expressivism of Charles Stevenson , and the universal prescriptivism of R. Hare , which was based on J. Austin's philosophy of speech acts. These theories were not without their critics.

Philippa Foot contributed several essays attacking all these theories. Perhaps the most influential being Elizabeth Anscombe , whose monograph Intention was called by Donald Davidson "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle". A significant feature of analytic philosophy since approximately has been the emergence of applied ethics —- an interest in the application of moral principles to specific practical issues. Topics of special interest for applied ethics include environmental issues , animal rights , and the many challenges created by advancing medical science.

As with the study of ethics, early analytic philosophy tended to avoid the study of philosophy of religion , largely dismissing as per the logical positivists the subject as part of metaphysics and therefore meaningless. Plantinga, Mackie and Flew debated the logical validity of the free will defense as a way to solve the problem of evil. Adams worked on the relationship of faith and morality.

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Phillips , among others. The name "contemplative philosophy" was first coined by D. Phillips in Philosophy's Cool Place , which rests on an interpretation of a passage from Wittgenstein's "Culture and Value. Phillips became two of the most prominent philosophers on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion. Current analytic political philosophy owes much to John Rawls , who in a series of papers from the s onward most notably "Two Concepts of Rules" and "Justice as Fairness" and his book A Theory of Justice , produced a sophisticated defence of a generally liberal egalitarian account of distributive justice.

This was followed soon by Rawls's colleague Robert Nozick 's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a defence of free-market libertarianism. Isaiah Berlin also had a lasting influence on both analytic political philosophy and Liberalism with his lecture the Two Concepts of Liberty. During recent decades there have also been several critiques of liberalism, including the feminist critiques of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin , the communitarian critiques of Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre although neither of them endorses the term , and the multiculturalist critiques of Amy Gutmann and Charles Taylor.

Consequentialist libertarianism also derives from the analytic tradition. Another development of political philosophy was the emergence of the school of Analytical Marxism. Members of this school seek to apply techniques of analytic philosophy modern social science such as rational choice theory to clarify the theories of Karl Marx and his successors. The best-known member of this school is G. Cohen , whose work, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence , is generally considered to represent the genesis of this school.

In that book, Cohen used logical and linguistic analysis to clarify and defend Marx's materialist conception of history. The work of these later philosophers have furthered Cohen's work by bringing to bear modern social science methods, such as rational choice theory, to supplement Cohen's use of analytic philosophical techniques in the interpretation of Marxian theory. Cohen himself would later engage directly with Rawlsian political philosophy to advance a socialist theory of justice that contrast with both traditional Marxism and the theories advanced by Rawls and Nozick.

In particular, he indicates Marx's principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre , Charles Taylor , Michael Walzer , and Michael Sandel advance a critique of Liberalism that uses analytic techniques to isolate the main assumptions of Liberal individualists, such as Rawls, and then challenges these assumptions. In particular, Communitarians challenge the Liberal assumption that the individual can be considered as fully autonomous from the community in which he lives and is brought up. Instead, they argue for a conception of the individual that emphasizes the role that the community plays in forming his or her values, thought processes and opinions.

One striking difference with respect to early analytic philosophy was the revival of metaphysical theorizing during the second half of the 20th century. Philosophers such as David Kellogg Lewis and David Armstrong developed elaborate theories on a range of topics such as universals, causation, possibility and necessity, and abstract objects. Among the developments that resulted in the revival of metaphysical theorizing were Quine 's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction , which was generally considered to weaken Carnap 's distinction between existence questions internal to a framework and those external to it.

Metaphysics remains a fertile topic of research, having recovered from the attacks of A. Ayer and the logical positivists. Although many discussions are continuations of old ones from previous decades and centuries, the debate remains active. The philosophy of fiction, the problem of empty names, and the debate over existence's status as a property have all become major concerns, while perennial issues such as free will, possible worlds, and the philosophy of time have been revived. Science has also had an increasingly significant role in metaphysics.

The theory of special relativity has had a profound effect on the philosophy of time, and quantum physics is routinely discussed in the free will debate. Philosophy of language is a topic that has decreased during the last four decades, as evidenced by the fact that few major philosophers today treat it as a primary research topic.

Indeed, while the debate remains fierce, it is still strongly influenced by those authors from the first half of the century: Austin , Alfred Tarski , and W. In Saul Kripke 's publication Naming and Necessity , he argued influentially that flaws in common theories of proper names are indicative of larger misunderstandings of the metaphysics of necessity and possibility.

By wedding the techniques of modal logic to a causal theory of reference, Kripke was widely regarded as reviving theories of essence and identity as respectable topics of philosophical discussion. Reacting against both the verificationism of the logical positivists as well as the critiques of the philosopher of science Karl Popper , who had suggested the falsifiability criterion on which to judge the demarcation between science and non-science, discussions of philosophy of science during the last 40 years were dominated by social constructivist and cognitive relativist theories of science.

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Thomas Samuel Kuhn with his formulation of paradigm shifts and Paul Feyerabend with his epistemological anarchism are significant for these discussions. A large portion of current epistemological research is intended to resolve the problems that Gettier's examples presented to the traditional justified true belief model of knowledge, including developing theories of justification in order to deal with Gettier's examples, or giving alternatives to the justified true belief model. Other and related topics of contemporary research include debates between internalism and externalism , [50] basic knowledge, the nature of evidence , the value of knowledge, epistemic luck , virtue epistemology , the role of intuitions in justification, and treating knowledge as a primitive concept.

As a result of attacks on the traditional aesthetic notions of beauty and sublimity from post-modern thinkers, analytic philosophers were slow to consider art and aesthetic judgment. Susanne Langer [51] and Nelson Goodman [52] addressed these problems in an analytic style during the s and s.

Since Goodman, aesthetics as a discipline for analytic philosophers has flourished. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Part of a series on Philosophy Plato Kant Nietzsche. Quote on the definition: Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities.

It is not a tradition that aims primarily for inspiration or consolation or ideology. Nor is it particularly concerned with 'philosophy of life,' though parts of it are. This kind of philosophy is more like science than religion, more like mathematics than poetry — though it is neither science nor mathematics.

What distinguishes twentieth-century analytical philosophy from at least some philosophy in other traditions, or at other times, is not a categorical rejection of philosophical systems, but rather the acceptance of a wealth of smaller, more thorough and more rigorous, investigations that need not be tied to any overarching philosophical view. Practitioners of types of philosophizing that are not in the analytic tradition—- such as phenomenology, classical pragmatism, existentialism, or Marxism—- feel it necessary to define their position in relation to analytic philosophy.

Further through the Subject Oxford University Press, , p. In this volume two other immensely rich and important such traditions are introduced: Indian philosophy, and philosophical thought in Europe from the time of Hegel. Cohen, The Dialogue of Reason: Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy? Cambridge University Press, , p. It did not only criticize the latter's denial of the existence of an external world anyway an unjust criticism , but also the bombastic, obscure style of Hegel's writings.

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Archived from the original PDF on Archived from the original on The Logical Structure of the World. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. A companion to analytic philosophy. The dawn of analysis 2nd print. Indeed, far from unrevisability explaining analyticity, it would seem to be analyticity that explains unrevisability: It is important to note here a crucial change that Quine and earlier Positivists casually introduced into the characterization of the a priori , and consequently into much of the now common understanding of the analytic.

But this is a further claim that many defenders of the traditional notions need not embrace. A claim might be in fact analytic and justifiable independently of experience, but nevertheless perfectly revisable in the light of it. Just what claims are genuinely analytic might not be available at the introspective or behavioral surface of our lives, in merely our dispositions to assent or dissent from sentences, as Quine supposes. The relevant dispositions might be hidden more deeply in our psychology, and our access to them as fallible as our access to any other such facts about ourselves.

Natural kinds are dramatic cases in point see Putnam , [], At some stage in history probably the only way anyone could tell whether something was a case of polio was to see whether there was a certain constellation of standard symptoms; other ways including asking others asymmetrically depended upon that way.

Indeed, should a doctor propose revising the test for polio in the light of better theory—perhaps reversing the dependency of certain tests—this would not even appear to involve a change in the meaning. If the appearance of the analytic is to be explained away, it needs to account for such differences in our understanding of different sorts of verbal revisions. Since they follow Quine in at least claiming to forswear the analytic, we will not consider their views further here. Bealer , defends similar proposals. Neither Bonjour nor Bealer are in fact particularly concerned to defend the analytic by such claims, but their recourse to mere understanding of propositional content is certainly what many defenders of the analytic have had in mind.

Perhaps the most modest reply along these lines emerges from a suggestion of David Lewis [] , who proposes to implicitly define common, e. He later , p. The Quinean reply to all these approaches as they stand is pretty straightforward, and, in a way, expresses what many regard as the real heart of his challenge to all proponents of the analytic: Again, consider the resistance Kahneman reports people displaying to correction of the fallacies they commit in a surprising range of ordinary thought cf.

This suggestion gradually emerged in the work of Putnam [], [] and , Kripke [] and Burge , , but it takes the form of positive theories in, e. Fodor , b , for example, claims that [ 9 ]. Of course, an externalist might cheerfully just allow that some analytic truths, e. Thus, being H 2 O is what makes something water, and to take the striking examples of diseases noted by Putnam, being the activation of a certain virus is what makes something polio.

But, of course, such an external view would still dash the hopes of philosophers looking to the analytic to explain a priori knowledge see Bealer and Jackson for strategies to assimilate such empirical cases to nevertheless a priori analysis. It may be essential to knowing the meaning of a term at least that such claims are regularly believed by users of it.

On this account, then, a claim might turn out to be analytic and false! They emphasize how the meaning properties of a term are the ones that play a basic explanatory role with regard to the use of a term generally, the ones in virtue ultimately of which a term is used with that meaning. Devitt and Horwich differ about the proper locus of such a strategy.

There are several potential problems with these strategies. A second problem, however, is that they still risk Quinean scepticism about meaning and the analytic. For, if Quine is right about the psychology of language use, then there may be no sufficiently local explanatorily basic facts on which all other uses of a term depend. Of course, Quine might be wrong about taking the case of theoretic terms in science to be representative of terms in human psychology generally. Indeed, arguably a crucial defect of much of the discussion of the analytic we have considered so far is that it is too confined to surface phenomena, either introspective or behavioral.

This is probably at least partly due to the traditional view that introspection and ordinary behavior are our only access to the mind. It might be thought that appeals to such data beg the question against Quine, since, as Quine pointed out, so much as asking subjects to say whether two expressions are synonymous, antonymous, or implicative is simply transferring the burden of determining what is being discussed from the theorist to the informant.

Do they manifest the analytic or merely an entrenched belief? The Chomskyan actually has the seed of an interesting reply. It is easy for us to produce in our behavior strings of words that may communicate information effectively, but which may violate those principles. This is something that, as yet, it is by no means obvious that it can do. Moreover, many linguists e. For example, Jackendoff and others have called attention to the heavy use of spatial metaphors in many grammatical constructions. People may find it useful to conceive of these domains in spatial ways.

In considering Chomskyan theories of the analytic, it is important to bear in mind that, while the theory may be as methodologically empiricist as any theory ought to be, the theory itself explicitly rejects empiricist conceptions of meaning and mind themselves. Of course, just how we come by the meaning of whatever primitive concepts their theories do endorse, is a question they would seriously have to confront, cf. Recently, some philosophers have offered some empirical evidence that might be taken to undermine these efforts to empirically ground the analytic, casting doubt on just how robust the data for the analytic might be.

Questions, of course, could be raised about these experimental results How well did the subjects understand the project of assessing intuitions? To what extent are the target terms merely polysemous, allowing for different uses in different contexts? However, the results do serve to show how the determination of meaning and analytic truths can be regarded as a more difficult empirical question than philosophers have traditionally supposed see Bishop and Trout and Alexander and Weinberg for extensive discussion. Suppose linguistics were to succeed in delineating a class of analytic sentences grounded in a special language faculty.

Perhaps some of them would. Moreover, setting out the constitutive conditions for possessing a concept might be of some interest to philosophers generally, since many of the crucial questions they ask concern the proper understanding of ordinary notions such as material object, person, action, freedom, god, the good , or the beautiful. If so, then it might not be implausible to claim that successful conceptual analysis could provide us with some a priori knowledge of such domains.

But, of course, many philosophers have wanted more than these essentially psychological gains. They have hoped that analytic claims might provide a basis for a priori knowledge of domains that exist independently of us and not exhausted by our concepts. An important case in point would seem to be the very case of arithmetic that motivated much of the discussion of the analytic in the first place. As Boolos asks in response to Wright:.

The problem here becomes even more obvious in non-mathematical cases. For example, philosophers have wanted to claim not merely that our concepts of red and green exclude the possibility of our thinking that something is both colors all over, but that this possibility is ruled out for the actual colors , red and green, themselves if such there be. But it is just such a wonderful coincidence between merely our concepts and actual worldly properties that a linguistic semantics alone does not obviously ensure. But suppose there in fact existed a wonderful correspondence between our concepts and the world, indeed, a deeply reliable, counterfactual supporting correspondence whereby it was in fact metaphysically impossible for certain claims constitutive of those concepts not to be true.

This is, of course, not implausible in the case of logic and arithmetic, and is entirely compatible with, e. Indeed, in the case of logic and arithmetic, the beliefs might be arrived at by steps that were not only necessarily reliable, but might also be taken to be so by the believer, in ways that might in fact depend in no way upon experience, but only on his competence with the relevant concepts Kitcher , Rey and Goldman explore this strategy. Such a reliabilist approach, though, might be less than fully satisfying to someone interested in the traditional analytic a priori.

Knowledge that the relevant claims were knowable a priori might itself be only possible by an empirically informed understanding of, e. But the trouble then is that claims that people do have a capacity for a priori knowledge seems quite precarious. As we noted earlier footnote 2 , people are often unreliable at appreciating deductively valid arguments; appreciating the standard rules even of natural deduction is for many people often a difficult intellectual achievement. Consider, for example, the common puzzle about the possibility that computers might actually think and enjoy a mental life.

In response to this puzzle, some philosophers e. Should this really satisfy the person worried about the possibility of artificial thought? For the serious question that concerns people worried about whether artifacts could think concerns whether those artifacts could in fact share the real, theoretically interesting, explanatory properties of being a thinking thing cf.

Alternatively, one might argue that what the language faculty provides are not sentences with truth-conditions, but merely defeasible constraints on how the sentence might be used by our conceptual system to express the truth conditional claims that people make with the sentences as in Sperber and Wilson , Carsten , Pietroski , , and forthcoming, and Rey, ; cf. Of course, one could insist on adhering to whatever meaning constraints turn out to be imposed by natural language and so, perhaps, deny that inanimate computers could ever think.

But, if the explanatory point were correct, it would be hard to see how this would amount to anything more than a verbal quibble: It might also provide a basis for analytic a priori knowledge of claims about concept-dependent domains, such as those of ethics and aesthetics. However, in the case of concept-independent domains, such as logic and mathematics, or the nature of worldly phenomena like life or mind, the prospects seem more problematic.

There may be analytic claims to be had here, but at least in these cases they would, in the immortal words of Putnam [], p. The Intuitive Distinction 1. Problems with the Distinction 3. The Intuitive Distinction Compare the following two sets of sentences: Some doctors that specialize on eyes are rich.

Some ophthalmologists are rich.


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Many bachelors are ophthalmologists. People who run damage their bodies. If Holmes killed Sikes, then Watson is dead. All doctors that specialize on eyes are doctors. All ophthalmologists are doctors. All bachelors are unmarried. People who run move their bodies. If Holmes killed Sikes, then Sikes is dead. In all judgments in which the relation of a subject to the predicate is thought if I only consider affirmative judgments, since the application to negative ones is easy this relation is possible in two different ways.

Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A as something that is covertly contained in this concept A ; or B lies entirely outside the concept A , though to be sure it stands in connection with it. In the first case, I call the judgment analytic, in the second synthetic.

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But then, picking up a suggestion of Leibniz, he went on to claim: I merely draw out the predicate in accordance with the principle of contradiction, and can thereby at the same time become conscious of the necessity of the judgment. If Bob is married to Sue, then Sue is married to Bob. If x is bigger than y , and y is bigger than z , then x is bigger than z. Consequently italicizing non-logical expressions , All doctors that specialize on eyes are doctors. All cats that chase mice are cats. All mice are cats. High Hopes Why should philosophy be interested in what would seem to be a purely linguistic notion?

Drawing on his earlier discussion [] of the conventionality of logic, he argues that logic could not be established by such conventions, since the logical truths, being infinite in number, must be given by general conventions rather than singly; and logic is needed then in the meta-theory, in order to apply the general conventions to individual cases , p.

As Quine goes on to observe: How then are we to delimit the category of legislative postulation, short of including under it every new act of scientific hypothesis? It is a pale grey lore, black with fact and white with convention.

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But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones. If we do this for enough cases, then we can test all sorts of hypotheses about the intension of the expression. Include only platitudes that are common knowledge among us —everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on. For the meanings of our words are common knowledge, and I am going to claim that names of mental states derive their meaning from these platitudes.

Conclusion Suppose linguistics were to succeed in delineating a class of analytic sentences grounded in a special language faculty. As Boolos asks in response to Wright: If numbers are supposed to be identical if and only if the concepts they are numbers of are equinumerous, what guarantee do we have that every concept has a number? Tomberlin, Philosophical Perspectives Volume I: Metaphysics , Atascadero, CA: