Analytic philosophy

• 1. Introduction

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  Analytic philosophy is a style of Western thinking, strongest in the English-speaking world. It prizes clear prose, tight argument, formal logic and respect for the natural sciences. It is also marked by a steady concern with language and meaning. One famous story about its history involves no argument at all. According to Norman Malcolm, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was insisting that a sentence and the fact it describes must share a logical form. His friend Piero Sraffa replied with a gesture instead of a rebuttal.

  Sraffa brushed the underside of his chin with an outward sweep of his fingertips. Neapolitans know that sign as a mark of disgust or contempt. Then he asked a single question: what is the logical form of that? Malcolm credits that moment with giving Wittgenstein the break from his earlier thinking.

  The tradition that Wittgenstein helped shape is often set against continental philosophy, a catch-all name for existentialism, phenomenology and Hegelianism. Some observers frame the split as technical philosophy on one side and literary philosophy on the other. Analytic thinkers began to multiply around the turn of the twentieth century, and by the second half of that century they dominated.

  So where did this approach come from, and who first insisted that philosophers should work like logicians? Why did its most self-assured movement fall apart? And how did a school so fixated on sentences end up arguing about parallel worlds, bats, consciousness and fairness?

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• 2. Roots in Central Europe

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  Michael Dummett argued that the usual label Anglo-American hides the real story, and that Anglo-Austrian would fit better. The reason lies with Franz Brentano, an Austrian philosopher who handed the field the puzzle of intentionality, the way a thought is always about something. For Brentano, loving involves something loved, hating involves something hated, and judging involves something affirmed or denied. He called this directedness the mark of the mental, and he held that no physical object shows anything like it.

  Brentano's circle produced stranger offspring. Alexius Meinong founded the Graz School and defended the view that flying pigs and golden mountains have being even though they do not exist. Critics nicknamed this Meinong's jungle. Meanwhile Kazimierz Twardowski founded the Lwów-Warsaw school in Poland, where he urged what he called small philosophy, the patient and systematic analysis of particular problems. Edmund Husserl also belonged to the School of Brentano.

  The figure usually named as the father of the whole tradition was a German geometry professor at the University of Jena. Gottlob Frege published his Begriffsschrift, or Concept-script, in 1879. It created modern predicate logic with quantifiers. It also merged the ancient Aristotelian and Stoic strands, so that a far wider range of sentences could be broken into logical form.

  Frege then took aim at psychology. In 1891 Husserl had argued in Philosophie der Arithmetik that the idea of a cardinal number comes from mentally grouping and counting things. Frege answered in The Foundations of Arithmetic of 1884. He answered again in The Basic Laws of Arithmetic, which appeared between 1893 and 1903. Mathematics and logic, he said, have public objects that do not depend on anyone's private mental states. His project of reducing arithmetic to pure logic is called logicism.

  In 1892 Frege posed a puzzle. "The Morning Star is the Evening Star" tells us something new, while "the Morning Star is the Morning Star" does not. Yet both names point to the planet Venus. His answer separated the reference of a term from its sense. His 1884 book also set a rule: never ask for a word's meaning in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition. Dummett traces the linguistic turn to that rule.

  In his 1918 paper "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry", Frege added a third realm beyond physical objects and private ideas. It holds Platonic propositions, with the Pythagorean theorem as his example. In England, a Cambridge philosopher named Bertrand Russell was already beginning to put Frege's logic to work.

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• 3. Revolt at Cambridge

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  Long before Russell, nineteenth-century Britain had seen a logic revival begun by Richard Whately and carried forward by the mathematician George Boole. The circle widened to include Augustus De Morgan, William Stanley Jevons, John Venn and Hugh MacColl. It also took in Charles Sanders Peirce and even Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Yet British philosophy itself was ruled by British idealism, a neo-Hegelian movement taught by F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green. Bradley's Appearance and Reality of 1893 was its showpiece.

  Analytic philosophy in the narrower sense of twentieth-century English-language thought is usually said to begin when Russell and G. E. Moore rejected Hegelianism as obscure. Russell described the feeling this way: "With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green". The sun and stars, he added, would exist even if no one noticed them. Idealists held that a thing can be known only by knowing the whole world. Russell and Moore replied with logical atomism, the claim that the world is made of independent facts.

  In 1901 Russell discovered a paradox in Frege's Basic Law V, which wrecked Frege's set theory. Russell stayed loyal to logicism all the same. In 1905 he published "On Denoting" in the journal Mind, an essay later called a paradigm of philosophy. It tackled sentences about "the present King of France", who does not exist, by treating names as disguised descriptions. "Walter Scott", for example, could be swapped for "the author of Waverley".

  The essay also exposed scope ambiguity. Denying that the present King of France is bald can mean that there is no such king, or that he exists and has hair. Russell quipped, "Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig."

  Russell and Alfred North Whitehead then produced Principia Mathematica, published from 1910 to 1913. It borrowed notation from Giuseppe Peano and used a theory of types to dodge Russell's own paradox. Logic could also expose hidden structure in everyday words. The little word "is" can assert a property, as in a cat being asleep. It can assert existence, as in there being a cat. It can also assert identity, as in three being half of six. From about 1910 to 1930 analytic philosophers dreamed of an ideal language free from such ambiguities.

  Decades later, Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems would show that Principia Mathematica had failed to reduce arithmetic to logic.

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• 4. Ladder and Circle

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  "The world is all that is the case." So begins the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921 by Russell's student Wittgenstein. The book pictures the universe as the totality of actual states of affairs, mirrored by atomic propositions joined through logical operators. It gave philosophers the vocabulary of tautology, truth conditions and the truth table. Wittgenstein believed tautologies say nothing but display the logical shape of the world, which led some readers to call him a mystic.

  Then the book undermined itself. Its closing pages declare that its own propositions are meaningless, like a ladder to be thrown away after climbing. Its last line reads, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Wittgenstein believed he had solved every problem of philosophy.

  From the late 1920s to the 1940s, two groups turned his ideas and Russell's into logical positivism. The Vienna Circle, once called the Ernst Mach Society, was led by Moritz Schlick and included Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. The Berlin Circle was led by Hans Reichenbach and counted Carl Hempel and the mathematician David Hilbert among its members. Their verification principle sorted meaningful statements into two kinds: the analytic truths of logic and mathematics, and the verifiable claims of science.

  Everything else was nonsense, including metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics. They found their motto in the closing lines of David Hume's Enquiry of 1748. Hume urged that any book lacking abstract reasoning about number, or experimental reasoning about fact, be committed to the flames. It could hold, he said, "nothing but sophistry and illusion." Philosophy was left with a modest job, which was clarifying thoughts.

  Even so, the members disagreed. Schlick pictured knowledge as a pyramid resting on a first layer. Neurath rejected foundations and compared knowledge to a ship rebuilt while sailing the open sea. Friedrich Waismann coined the idea of open texture, the lasting possibility of vagueness in empirical statements. Carnap and Reichenbach launched the journal Erkenntnis, and Carnap urged philosophers to take semantic ascent, discussing language rather than its objects.

  The ideas also crossed the world. Zhang Shenfu introduced Russell to Chinese readers and later translated the Tractatus, and Russell visited China in 1920 at the invitation of Liang Qichao. Tscha Hung brought logical positivism there with The Philosophy of the Vienna Circle in 1945. Jin Yuelin and Hong Qian carried the work forward until Communist political pressure sidelined it. After the reform and opening up of the 1970s, a third phase began, and the field is now active and growing.

  Politics scattered the Europeans. Neurath, Waismann, Hans Hahn and Reichenbach were Jewish, while Carnap was a gentile who was a socialist and pacifist. When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, many members of both circles fled to Britain and the United States. Their arrival strengthened analytic philosophy in English-speaking countries. In 1936 Schlick was murdered in Vienna by a former student, Hans Nelböck. That same year A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic introduced logical positivism to English readers.

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• 5. Words in Use

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  Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations appeared in 1953, after his death. It differed so sharply from the Tractatus that philosophers speak of an early and a later Wittgenstein as though they were two people. The first crack came from Frank Ramsey, who pointed out that no point in space can show two colors at once. That looks like a necessary truth, yet it is not a purely logical one, and the Tractatus allowed only logical necessity. Wittgenstein answered in "Some Remarks on Logical Form" of 1929, the only academic paper he ever published.

  Ramsey died of jaundice the next year, aged 26. The Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer also pushed Wittgenstein away from the Tractatus.

  The new Wittgenstein described philosophy as a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language. His task was to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle. He proposed language-games, simple pieces of language tied to a form of life. The utterance "Water!" might be an order, an answer or something else, depending on the game being played. Meaning, on this view, is use.

  He also noticed that games share no single trait but are linked by overlapping similarities, which he called family resemblance. In his beetle-in-a-box thought experiment, everyone has a box they alone can look into, and each calls the contents a beetle. Under those conditions the word beetle means nothing. The duck-rabbit drawing, which can be seen as either animal, illustrated the difference between seeing that and seeing as.

  At Oxford, a different strand of ordinary language philosophy grew up around Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson and John L. Austin. They suspected that everyday speech already contained fine distinctions that traditional philosophers had missed. In The Concept of Mind of 1949, Ryle called Descartes' ghost in the machine a myth built on category errors. He compared it to touring a campus, its buildings, teachers and students, and then asking where the university is.

  Strawson's "On Referring" of 1950 challenged Russell by arguing that using a description presupposes that something fits it. Austin's posthumous How to Do Things with Words of 1962 showed that sentences like "I promise" do things rather than merely report them. That insight set off a performative turn across several fields. Austin also influenced pragmatics, the study of context in language, which Paul Grice established with his maxims and his theory of implicature.

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• 6. Metaphysics Returns

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  Wilfrid Sellars, the son of Roy Wood Sellars, is said to have revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States. His 1956 essay on the Myth of the Given attacked the sense-data theories that logical positivism relied on. In 1962 he contrasted the manifest image of the world with the scientific image. His hope of joining them became the basis of the Pittsburgh School, whose members include Robert Brandom, John McDowell and John Haugeland.

  At Harvard, W. V. O. Quine, a student of Carnap, became the dominant American philosopher of his day. He wanted philosophy to be continuous with science, differing only in being the most general science. His 1951 paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction at the heart of positivism. It is sometimes called the most important paper of twentieth-century philosophy. Every term, he argued, takes its meaning from a vast network of belief about the whole world.

  In Word and Object of 1960, Quine imagined a linguist who hears a speaker of an unknown language say "gavagai" on seeing a rabbit. Nothing rules out that the speaker means an undetached rabbit-part, such as an ear. In his 1948 essay "On What There Is", he used Pegasus in place of the King of France. He nicknamed the puzzle of nonexistence Plato's beard. His dictum there was "To be is to be the value of a variable".

  Saul Kripke brought essence and identity back as respectable subjects. His 1980 book Naming and Necessity argued that proper names are rigid designators, naming the same thing in every possible world. The description "winner of the 1968 US presidential election" might have picked out Hubert Humphrey, but the name "Richard Nixon" always names Nixon. Kripke also argued for truths that are necessary yet known only through experience, such as water being H2O, or gold being atomic number 79. Hilary Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment pursued a related point about natural kinds.

  In 1982 Kripke read Wittgenstein as posing what he called the most radical and original skeptical problem philosophy had seen, a paradox about following rules. A fictional thinker holding that reading has been nicknamed Kripkenstein.

  David Lewis went further. In Counterfactuals of 1973 and On the Plurality of Worlds of 1986, he defended the real, concrete existence of other possible worlds. He treated "actual" as a label, like "here", that we apply to whichever world we occupy. He visited the Australian philosophical community almost every year for more than 30 years.

  Older puzzles also got new life. In 1963 Edmund Gettier's paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" offered counterexamples that revived the study of knowledge. In Reasons and Persons of 1984, Derek Parfit imagined a person who splits in two, each half surviving with half a brain. Nelson Goodman's 1955 riddle of induction invented the predicates grue and bleen. "All emeralds are grue" holds before some time t, while "all emeralds are bleen" holds after it.

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• 7. Minds and Machines

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  Hilary Putnam once imagined "super Spartans" who feel pain but never show a sign of it, and the picture sank a whole theory. That theory was behaviorism, the leading account of mind in analytic philosophy for the first half of the twentieth century. Inspired by the logical positivists, behaviorists held that statements about the mind amount to statements about behavior. Putnam replied that this confuses the symptoms of mental states with the states themselves.

  Ryle's former students at the University of Adelaide, Jack Smart and Ullin Place, argued that mental states are brain states. Putnam answered that one mental state could be realized in many physical ways, and the criticism gave rise to anomalous monism. Functionalism then took over and remains dominant. Jerry Fodor proposed the modularity of mind and a language of thought, sometimes called mentalese.

  John Searle's Chinese room argument says a computer can grasp syntax but never semantics, and Ned Block's China brain makes a related point. Eliminativists went further. Paul and Patricia Churchland deny that propositional attitudes exist. Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained in 1991, is regarded as an eliminativist about qualia, the felt qualities of experience. Dennett also coined the term intuition pump.

  Against the physicalists stood Thomas Nagel's paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and Frank Jackson's knowledge argument. David Chalmers named the hard problem of consciousness and revived property dualism, while panpsychism treats mentality as fundamental throughout nature. Yet there is a general consensus around the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness. Beyond that, the specifics divide experts among Searle's naive realism, Rosenthal's higher-order thought model, and Armstrong and Lycan's higher-order perception model.

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• 8. Right, Wrong and Fair

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  G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica of 1903 argued that goodness is a simple, undefinable, non-natural property, and it named the naturalistic fallacy. Early analytic philosophers otherwise doubted that ethics could be made rigorous enough to deserve attention. The logical positivists took the opposite route and called value statements non-cognitive. Their emotivism, nicknamed the hurrah-boo theory, treated saying "Murder is wrong" as equivalent to saying "Boo to murder".

  Charles Stevenson refined this in Ethics and Language of 1944, and R. M. Hare developed universal prescriptivism. In 1977 the Australian John Mackie went further in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, defending error theory and an argument from queerness.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, interest in moral philosophy returned. Philippa Foot defended naturalist moral realism and introduced the trolley problem. Elizabeth Anscombe's article "Modern Moral Philosophy" appeared in 1958. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue followed in 1981. Together with Foot they helped revive Aristotle's virtue ethics, sometimes called the aretaic turn.

  John Rawls's A Theory of Justice of 1971 restored interest in Kantian deontology. It offered a liberal egalitarian account of fair distribution, built on the veil of ignorance. His colleague Robert Nozick answered in Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974, defending free-market libertarianism through the Wilt Chamberlain argument. Nozick also asked an odd question. If he spills a can of his tomato juice into the sea, does he gain the sea, or has he "foolishly dissipated my tomato juice"?

  Isaiah Berlin's 1958 lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty" separated negative liberty, freedom from interference, from positive liberty, self-mastery. G. A. Cohen's 1978 book defending Marx founded analytical Marxism, and H. L. A. Hart's The Concept of Law of 1961 popularized legal positivism.

  Since around 1970, applied ethics has grown, driven by new technology and scientific knowledge. Peter Singer argued for vegetarianism in Animal Liberation in 1975. Questions about medicine, such as abortion and euthanasia, keep producing difficult cases for philosophers to work through.

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