Analytic

Philosophy, the Analytic School, and British Philosophy John Skorupski 1 Introductory: analytic philosophy and the Analytic school 2 The Analytic school 3 Non-empirical knowledge 4 Consciousness and science 5 Ethics 6 Concluding thoughts 1 Introductory: analytic philosophy and the Analytic school The aim of this chapter is to assess the relations between analytic philosophy and the British philosophical tradition. That calls for some preliminary clarifying of tasks and terms. For the purpose of our discussion, we can make two rough and ready distinctions. The first is between background and influence. Background will be understood broadly: it can cover any aspect of pre-analytic British philosophy which is interestingly similar to approaches or themes in analytic philosophy and which may or may not have influenced it. Influence, in contrast, is causal, and thus often very hard to establish. Then there are large possibilities in between: even where there is no causal influence of one work on another, both may spring from a common cast of mind, or some national continuity or persisting tradition. This kind of possibility is speculative; but a sufficient commonality of background themes or approaches may suggest quite strongly that it is there. Consider, in particular, the case of Mills System of Logic.1 The whole of this work counts as background; Mills concerns, his theses, and his methods, are throughout readily recognisable to any analytic philosopher working today. What of its influence? Since it became for several decades a standard text in British universities it had an influence that was pervasive. However influence can of course be negative not least in the case of standard texts and in the case of the System it often was, both in Britain and abroad. A particularly striking instance is Mills empiricist account of logic and mathematics. Frege discusses and rejects it in his Foundations of Arithmetic,2 arguing against Mill on the one hand and Kant on the other that arithmetic is analytic; that discussion was to have a lasting effect. The Vienna Circle empiricists lined up on Freges side against Mills radical empiricism, though their notion of analyticity was very different from that of Frege. Another point is that negative influence can also work, and often does work, through misunderstanding. A reaction against something never actually said can produce a fresh impetus. Moores naturalistic fallacy is an example3 Mill, J. S. (1963 91), vols VII&VIII (A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, first published 1843). 2 Frege , G., 1953 (first published 1884). 3 See Moore, G.E. 1993 (first published 1903).
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and also a very good example of how counter-suggestibility is a significant philosophical force. No-one not Mill or anyone else had committed the so- called naturalistic fallacy till Moore named it4 but once he had named it became tempting to affirm the very thing he called a fallacy. And yet, after all these vicissitudes, to read Mills philosophy today be it the System or Utilitarianism is to be forcibly struck by the way its sober, humane naturalism represents one resilient strand in British thought, a stance which, if anything, exists more strongly than ever in current analytic philosophy. It is not implausible to see this stance as springing from a British tradition of thought, a persisting cast of mind. We shall return to this. The second distinction we shall need is between analytic philosophy and what I shall call the Analytic school. By the latter I mean a distinctive school of 20th Century philosophy which focuses on the idea that the analysis of language is basic to philosophy as such: basic, moreover, in a particular way as the route by which traditional philosophical questions can be revealed as pseudo-problems. Historically, Wittgenstein is central to it, with Carnap close behind.5 The central and most influential thrust, as particularly represented by these two, was that analysis of language can dissolve philosophical questions; but around them we can group other independently important philosophers, such Schlick in Vienna and Russell and Moore in Cambridge philosophers who may not have propounded this central thesis or agreed with it but who were, so to speak, abreast of it, and contributed ideas that in one way or another affected it. Taking the Analytic school in this way, we can say that its early phases were the Cambridge of Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, and the Vienna of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Its antecedents include Moores and Russells rebellion against idealism, the influence of philosopher-scientists such as Mach, Hilbert and Einstein on the Vienna Circle, and of course the crucial impact of Frege, both in Cambridge and in Vienna. The Analytic school continued in later stages through Oxford ordinary language philosophy and the Harvard of Quine and Putnam. Its fair to say that it no longer really exists, any more than other distinctive modernist schools of philosophy of the first half or so of the 20th century really exist. I do not mean, of course, that there is some clear cut point at which it ceased to exist, or that philosophers can be straightforwardly placed in or outside it. Hilary Putnam, for example, can be seen both as a contributor to it and as a critic leading philosophy out of it. Nor do I mean that its ideas no longer have any influence. Intellectual movements cannot be crisply defined in such ways. Still, the Analytic school appears now as a historical phenomenon with a beginning and an end, a closely related set of movements that flourished in a certain distinctive cultural context,

Divine law theories of morality might be proposed as an exception. 5 Alberto Coffa rightly emphasized the role played by these two (Coffa 1991). It can be argued that Wittgenstein thought himself out of the Analytic school and in his later work started thinking against it, but that is compatible with recognising his seminal influence on it.
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a context in which the focus was on language, rather than the traditional triad of self, thought, and world.6 In contrast, analytic philosophy, as people use it now, is a very vague term. It is best characterised not by distinctive themes or methods but rather by institutions and to some extent by style. Analytic philosophy no longer even denotes ancestry from the Analytic school. Take for example the tradition of Franz Brentano and his Austrian and Polish pupils.7 It would now be normal to recognise that tradition, or at any rate large parts of it, as analytic philosophy, yet it is doctrinally distinct from the Analytic school and had only weak interactions with it. The same goes for the tradition of American pragmatism, which represented an independent source right through to the latter-day Harvard phase, when it got fused with the Analytic stance in the highly distinctive work of Quine. Thematically, analytic philosophy is now highly pluralistic, one might say highly balkanised. It has become possible to speak of analytic Marxism or analytic Thomism. Analytic Hegelianism is on its way. If we characterise analytic philosophy in terms of institutions, then it is a matter of what department youre in and in what journals you publish. In terms of style, as against content or institution, there is little more to it than an emphasis (in theory!) on clarity and care, a certain lack of overt rhetorical devices in favour of the more subtle rhetorical device of flaunted literal- mindedness in ones formulation and importantly, a more-or-less common stock of by-now familiar ideas, terms and symbols from the enormous advances achieved in modern logic and semantics. The latter unquestionably mark a watershed between our ways of doing philosophy and previous ways. They are loosely associated with the Analytic school inasmuch as this school recognised their importance, included thinkers who made important contributions to them, and in the English-language world was instrumental in bringing them into philosophy. In short, we should consider British background and influence on two disparate things the Analytic school, and something much broader and vaguer, analytic philosophy, with respect to which British background and influence is just one background among many. 2. The Analytic school. The idea I have taken to lie at the core of the Analytic school is that philosophical, specifically metaphysical, questions can be shown to be pseudo-questions by analysis of language use. The most powerful basis for this idea was linguistic conventionalism: the claim that aprioricity, and hence a priori epistemic norms, are a matter of linguistic convention. Epistemology becomes syntax; ontology becomes semantics. Or rather, within the Analytic school some combination of two views of ontology is possible. On the one hand one can see it as the shadow cast by It could be said that the true inheritors of the Vienna Circle in recent times have not been the analytic philosophers, many of whom have returned to metaphysics, but those post-modern philosophers who take texts to have priority over subjects and objects. (Of this at least Neurath could have approved.) 7 On the latter, often referred to as the Lvov-Warsaw School, see Wolenski 1989.
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linguistic reference: we are ontologically committed to what our theories turn out to refer to when their language is analysed. A corollary is that if more than one analysis is possible ontology is relative to an analysis. Thus, according to Carnaps ontological neutralism in the Aufbau,8 our theories of the world can be constructed in a language that refers only to sensations or in a language that refers only to physical objects. The question, is reality really physical or really mental, is a pseudo-question, along with such questions as which logic is really correct, what if anything do we know about the world as it really is, etc. We should simply make the rules of our preferred language clear. That being done, the indication of the nominatum [reference] of the sign of an object, consists in an indication of the truth criteria for those sentences in which the sign of this object can occur.9 A similar line, though with emphasis on variables rather than singular terms, is famously taken in Quines What is there?. 10 A somewhat different, but related, approach urges that ontology is a pseudo-science to be replaced by ordinary-language analysis of such words as real and exists. Take Austin on this little word real . According to Austin, real does not have one single, specifiable, always the same meaning [but] Nor does it have a large number of different meanings it is not ambiguous, even systematically 11 Carnap, Quine and Austin could all have agreed that it makes no sense to ask, about the things we talk about, or say there are, which of them really exist. So long, that is, as we take what we say to be true, we can ask no further and separate metaphysical question about whether what we are talking about exists, or about whether there are metaphysically distinct types of existence, being, etc. The difference is that for Carnap and Quine the question of what exists is to be answered by analysis of science, whereas Austin thinks the question has no single, specifiable answer. Nonetheless on either approach whether we proceed by logical construction, or by ordinary-language description we reject traditional metaphysical questions about the nature of existence as empty. We can call this Analytic approach to ontology the semantic conception of existence. (The idea that existence is not a predicate, derived from Fregean logic, goes with it.) It remained a leading Analytic doctrine throughout and is still highly influential, though nowadays by no means uncontested. It marks a dividing contrast with philosophers of the Brentano school, for whom questions about which among the objects we can think and talk about really exist were significant and important.12 Two other Analytic ideas should be mentioned. First, there is verificationism about meaning. This conception of meaning, entailing as it does rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, is a presupposition of Carnap 1967 (first published 1928). The writing of the Aufbau actually slightly pre-dated Carnaps espousal of verificationism (in Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy, also in Carnap 1967, written at the end of 1927). 9 Carnap 1967, pp 256-7. 10 Quine 1948. 11 Austin 1962, p. 64. 12 See especially Meinongs theory of objects, of 1904 (Meinong 1960). The tradition is being revived; see for example Priest 2008.
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conventionalism, in that it underwrites the conventionalists essential device of implicit definition.13 Second, the basic idea that a priori principles of logic and epistemology are simply conventions of a language implies a strong anti- psychologism in logic and epistemology. In short we have meaning as verification, epistemology as syntax, ontology as semantics and a strong anti-psychologism about the a priori. However while conventionalism is a dominant strain in the Analytic school, there is also another strain realism: logical realism about concepts, propositions, sets, or other abstract objects. It can be combined with logical or set-theoretic construction, so that here too ontology is heavily dependent on analysis of language. This realism is not as such incompatible with the conventionalist and verificationist position, for it can be combined with an appropriately non-realist account of truth. It only becomes incompatible if it is combined, instead, with a realist or correspondence conception of truth and an intuitionist epistemology of the a priori.14 But whether or not it is developed in the latter way it too assumes that one cannot significantly ask, about the things we turn out on analysis to talk about, which of them really exist and in what sense. And since according to the realist, analysis shows that we really do talk about abstract objects, we are committed to their existence. So logical realism, whether or not combined with verificationism, endorses the semantic conception of existence and also leads to strong anti-psychologism. On other matters, such the status of truth and the epistemology of the a priori, verificationists and realists about truth may disagree. But on these two they are at one. Pious horror at any form of psychologism, together with adherence to the semantic conception of ontology, were leading marks of the Analytic stance. We do not need to pursue the fascinating question of how these two fundamental directions in the Analytic school conventionalism and realism interacted. But we should ask what background for them, and more generally for the Analytic Schools distinctive preoccupations, can be found in British philosophy. The answer, it seems to me, is none at all. For the Analytic school, as much as for the school of Brentano, the background is essentially Austro- German.15 Of course, British philosophers were important within the Analytic school. Russell made a major contribution to the discovery and the interpretation of the paradoxes a subject that remains puzzling and unresolved and contributed an analysis of definite descriptions that became a much-discussed paradigm of analysis. Moores early conceptual monism16 played an important role as a weapon against idealism; moreover his discussions of knowledge and goodness were, and remain, seminal.17 A later phase of the school Oxford ordinary I discuss this connection between verificationism, implicit definition and conventionalism in Skorupski 2005, and give a fuller account of Analytic conceptions of meaning and truth in Skorupski 1997. 14 The former without the latter could be found, as many contemporary readers thought, in Wittgensteins Tractatus. 15 For an interpretation of the influences on Moore and Russell leading to a similar conclusion, see Bell 1999. 16 Moore 1899. 17 Moore 1993, 1925, 1939.
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language philosophy was in many ways distinctively English (Ernest Gellners waspish description of its practitioners as the Narodniks of North Oxford fits rather well).18 It produced important original work, for example by Austin and Strawson19 among others. In all these ways British philosophers made important contributions to the Analytic school. But what of the British background, as against the British contribution? The Vienna Circle paid tribute to Hume: his division of assertions into those which concerned matters of fact and existence and those which concerned relations of ideas seemed to them to prefigure their master-division into factual assertions and expressions of convention. But how much of an influence was Hume? For most of the 19th century in Britain Hume was in eclipse as a philosopher, as against a historian and essayist. When his work was revived by T. H. Green it was with a polemical purpose.20 Green presented him as the most intelligent naturalist, able to see clearly that naturalism collapses into scepticism, and thus rendering futile subsequent naturalistic projects by philosophically shallower thinkers. Naturally that was not the opinion of the Vienna Circle. But that is not to say that Hume was an influence, whether negative or positive, either on the British idealists or the Analytic School. The real influence on the Analytic School as on British idealism was Kant. The Vienna Circle was particularly concerned to deny the doctrine of mathematics as synthetic a priori: in this respect at least, it was Kant who had the influence, and his influence was negative.21 Humes views on mathematics did not get the detailed response from any philosopher in the Analytic school that Mills philosophy of mathematics got from Frege. It was simply that Hume could be held to be an empiricist who, unlike Mill, took mathematics to be analytic, and could thus symbolically carry the logical positivists banner. Humes great influence on analytic philosophy came later, mainly through his theory of motives and passions. Gellner 1979, p. 259. (Russells foreword to this volume may read like a purely internal English social skirmish but it interestingly shows just how out of sympathy he really was, not just to the Oxford style, but to the basic ideas of the Analytic school itself.) 19 Some examples: Austin 1962a and b, Strawson 1950, 1952. (However in later work Strawson seems to me to go beyond the Analytic school.) Michael Dummett, while not exactly an Oxford ordinary language philosopher is certainly a major figure in the Analytic school, both as interpreter and as contributor, for example in the essays collected in Dummett 1978. 20 See Greens lengthy introduction in Hume 1874. Around the same time Brentano and Meinong were taking an interest in British empiricism. Meinongs earliest publications, in 1877 and 1882, were on Hume; Brentano read and discussed Mill and other British philosopher/psychologists. Mills side of their correspondence, quoted by Brentano in Brentano 1995, p. 220, concerning predication and existence, can be found in Mill 1963 91, XVII (Later Letters), pp 1934-35. Brentano also sent Mill a copy of his book on Aristotle (Brentano 1867). I come back to this line of influence (from Mill through Brentano) in the next section. 21 Which is not to deny that Kant was also a positive influence in important ways see e.g. Coffa, 1991, Friedman 1991, Stroud 1984.
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While Hume influence was in abeyance in the 19th century, the leading schools in Britain were some combination of Reidian common sense mixed with Kant on the one hand, and on the other the empiricism of Bentham and the Mills. Neither party had any discernible influence on the Analytic school (as against the school of Brentano) in any of its phases, other than the negative influences already noted in the case of John Stuart Mill. And yet, with the passing of the Analytic school Bentham and Mill survive as strong influences within the broad and pluralistic domain of analytic philosophy just as Hume and Reid do. That suggests a wider point about the rise and fall of the Analytic tide in British philosophy. To make it we must broaden our picture, taking into account the trajectory of some lasting questions and debates that have existed throughout the last 200 years or so independently of the Analytic school, and irrespective of any treatment the Analytic school gave of them. There are three areas we can notice: A. Non-empirical knowledge B. Science and consciousness C. Moral and political philosophy. 3. Non-empirical knowledge To the question whether and in what sense there is such a thing as non-empirical knowledge the Analytic school proposed some highly distinctive and historically important answers, which we have noted. But what do we find if we step back and put these answers into a wider historical context? Here we need to go back again to Mill. Indeed it is not too much to say that we shall not have a clear view of the 19th century prehistory of analytic philosophy until Mills positions in the System and in the Examination22 are as well known and understood as the work of Frege and of the Brentano school. The System of Logic is an assault on the notion that there is a priori knowledge. But consider how Mill carries this through. The System comprises six substantial books; of these the first (Of Names and Propositions) is devoted to an analysis of language. Now language was not a wholly new concern of the philophical radicals. Bentham had contributed the notions of paraphrasis and the connected idea that one should think of sentences, not terms, as the integer of meaning. Mill adds to this his distinction between connotation and denotation and uses it to analyse the analytic/synthetic distinction, giving a very restrictive account of analytic sentences (or, as he calls them, verbal propositions). That gives him a semantic basis for his radical empiricism about logic and mathematics. Particularly relevant to the present discussion, however, is Mills attack on three other positions about the status of logic: Conceptualism, Nominalism, and Realism. The first of these amounts to psychologism about logic: the view that judgements are about mental representations and that the laws of logic are psychological laws governing how we operate with these representations.23 Mill, 1963 91, vol IX, An Examination of Sir William Hamiltons Philosophy, and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in his Writings (1865). 23 Bizarrely, Mill was for some time himself accused of psychologism about logic. For more on this misinterpretation, which seems to have come from Husserl, see Skorupski 1989, ch. 5, appendix.
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Mills response is to distinguish between mental acts and their objects; his discussion clearly influenced the very similar response of both Brentano and Frege, as a somewhat extended quotation will show: All language recognises a difference between a doctrine or opinion, and the fact of entertaining the opinion; between assent, and what is assented to. Logic, according to the conception here formed of it, has no concern with the nature of the act of judging or believing; the consideration of that act, as a phenomenon of the mind, belongs to another science. Collected Works, VII 134 But, Mill holds, that has not been the orthodox opinion hitherto: almost all the writers on Logic in the last two centuries, whether English, German, or French, have made their theory of Propositions, from one end to the other, a theory of Judgments. They considered a Proposition, or a Judgment, for they used the two words indiscriminately, to consist in affirming or denying one idea of another. To judge, was to put two ideas together, or to bring one idea under another, or to compare two ideas, or to perceive the agreement or disagreement between two ideas: and the whole doctrine of Propositions, together with the theory of Reasoning, (always necessarily founded on the theory of Propositions,) was stated as if Ideas, or Conceptions, or whatever other term the writer preferred as a name for mental representations generally, constituted essentially the subject matter and substance of those operations. Now Mills response: It is, of course, true, that in any case of judgment, as for instance when we judge that gold is yellow, a process takes place in our minds, of which some one or other of these theories is a partially correct account. We must have the idea of gold and the idea of yellow, and these two ideas must be brought together in our mind. But in the first place, it is evident that this is only a part of what takes place; for we may put two ideas together without any act of belief; as when we merely imagine something, such as a golden mountain; or when we actually disbelieve To determine what it is that happens in the case of assent or dissent besides putting two ideas together, is one of the most intricate of metaphysical problems. But whatever the solution may be, we may venture to assert that it can have nothing whatever to do with the import of propositions; for this reason, that propositions (except sometimes when the mind itself is the subject treated of) are not assertions respecting our ideas of things, but assertions respecting the things themselves. In order to believe that gold is yellow, I must, indeed, have the idea of gold, and the idea of yellow, and something having reference to those ideas must take place in my mind; but my belief has not reference to the ideas, it has reference to the things. Collected Works, VII 134-524 Of course once these distinctions between mental acts and their objects have been made, the question of what I am thinking about when I think, or seem to think, about the golden mountain comes to the fore. Here Mill provides no The first part of this passage, including the example of the golden mountain, is quoted by Brentano (Brentano 1995, p. 206).
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answer: answers came later, in Meinong and in Russell. Of the other two positions Mill rejects, Nominalism is the view that logic and mathematics consist of merely verbal truths he takes it to be the view of Hobbes, and deploys against it his distinction between denotation and connotation. Realism, the view that they consist of truths about abstract entities, he hardly takes seriously at all. In fact Mill is himself a nominalist in the modern sense (which poses a problem for him when he tries to specify what it is that terms connote). Mill could not, of course, have considered modern versions of Nominalism and Realism, as developed by the Analytic school. However its easy to see from his basic ideas and analytic tools that he would have rejected them. That leaves him with the same two problems facing a contemporary, post- Analytic-school, naturalist. The first is what account to give of the ontology of content if nominalism doesnt work the question, one might say, of whether to go Meinongian or Quinean about abstracta. The second question, which is worth considering in a little detail, is about non-empirical knowledge. While Mill rejects psychologism about logic and maths, seeing these rather as the most general truths of empirical science, his standpoint in epistemology may fairly be described as psychologistic. The System does a very good job of providing a naturalistic, internal vindication of the inductive process; but in the end Mill has to give some account of the principles of reasoning, or acquisition of warrant that he takes to be primitive. How then are these grounded? By observing the reasoning agent at work: Principles of Evidence and Theories of Method are not to be constructed a priori. The laws of our rational faculty, like those of every other natural agency, are only learnt by seeing the agent at work. (VIII 833) In this approach to epistemology Mill does not differ from his Reidian opponents. For both sides the epistemic grounding of basic normative principles, whether in epistemology or ethics, lies in our primitive psychological dispositions. However this is not a reductive kind of psychologism: it does not reduce epistemic and ethical principles to psychological propositions. Indeed realism about such principles, reductive or otherwise, is foreign to them. The main difference between Reid and Mill, at the meta-normative level, is that Reids psychologism is phenomenological and innatist, whereas Mills is behavioural (seeing the agent at work) and associationist.25 At the substantive level, of course, they differ much more. At this level the Reidian school was intuitionist in Mill s sense, i.e. it made a phenomenological appeal to a large number of principles of common sense, whereas Mill wanted to reduce basic principles, whether in epistemology or ethics, to the smallest possible number. Nonetheless, at the meta-normative level they share a naturalistic, psychological approach to the normative. Compare Wittgenstein at the end of his life: Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language game.26 Mill described it as the contrast between the introspective method (Reid) and the psychological method (himself). 26 Wittgenstein 1974, p. 204.
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This too sounds like psychologism in epistemology: we establish epistemic norms by describing the agent at work. It contrasts with the conventionalism of the Analytic school in interesting ways, but even more decidedly with the normative realism which we shall come to in section 5. So how can description of natural, inartificial, or original dispositions legitimately warrant our normative claims, whether in epistemology or ethics? No kind of realism can be the answer for any of these philosophers, since they take it for granted that there can be no receptive faculty by which we know of normative facts. 4. Consciousness and science In the 19th century the standpoint of phenomenal experience dominated philosophy; in the 20th century, the dominating standpoint came to be that of physics. Then, the standard question was how to fit physics into experience, now, the standard question is how to fit experience into physics. This is one of the most striking developments in 20th century philosophy. In just a few generations it moved from widespread acceptance of the philosophical idea that physics must somehow reduce to the contents of consciousness, to a quite different intellectual context: the equally widespread acceptance that consciousness must somehow reduce to a set of local elements or processes within physics. Few transitions provide more food for thought about the way extra-philosophical developments determine philosophy. (To be sure, history of philosophy also warns against dogmatic acceptance that we are now at the end of this story, or that it is the only story there is to tell.) The change has marched in step with another, the growth of scientific realism and that in turn with acceptance of inference to the best explanation as not merely a heuristic device but a basis for warranted belief. The 19th century largely took for granted (set aside German idealism here) that our own conscious states are all that we immediately know. Various positions in the philosophy of perception, which sounded as though they might be denying that, in fact still made this assumption as Mill pertinaciously argued in the Examination. Further, and just as importantly, it was also widely assumed through most of the century that only enumerative induction from particular observations can warrant a posteriori generalisations. As Larry Laudan noted in 1981, The method of hypothesis, known since antiquity, found few proponents between 1700 and 1850. During the last century, of course, [i.e. the century to the time at which Laudan was writing] that ordering has been inverted and despite an almost universal acknowledgement of its weaknesses the method of hypothesis (usually under such descriptions as 'hypothetico-deduction' or 'conjectures and refutations') has become the orthodoxy of the twentieth century.27 Now if what we can know consists solely of immediate consciousness, memory of previous consciousness, and the results of enumerative induction, as Mill thought, the outcome seems clear. What we can know is restricted to our sensory experience past and present, and law-like regularities within that
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Laudan 1981, p. 1. 10

experience. This was the view Mill called phenomenalism, and rightly described as an orthodoxy of his time. Phenomenalism in Mills sense holds that there can be no knowledge of entities distinct from and outside experience. There are then, as Mill notes, two possibilities. One is to hold that there are or may be unknowable things in themselves, external causes of sensation. The other is his distinctive innovation: reductive phenomenalism. Famously, Mill held that statements about material objects are reducible to brute counterfactuals about experience, i.e. counterfactuals not grounded in any categorical such as, in Berkeleys philosophy, the mind of God. This was new, and very close to 20th century linguistic phenomenalism although Mill also comes close to an error-theoretic view of our physicalistic language.28 A somewhat different possibility, which emerged soon after Mills defence of reductive phenomenalism, is the neutral monism of William James and Mach, among others. According to this rather mysterious doctrine the world consists of neutral elements which can be read either phenomenalistically or physicalistically. These two lines of thought reductive phenomenalism and neutral monism persisted well into the 20th century. They were an influence on the Analytic school. Linguistic phenomenalism became popular among Analytic philosophers; equally one can see Carnaps ontological neutralism as a kind of (would-be) non-metaphysical successor to neutral monism.29 Now consider the hypothetical method. A shift in its fortunes started in the latter half of the 19th century, with the work of the Cambridge scientist and philosopher William Whewell. Whewell argued that the method of hypothesis can yield warranted conclusions about the nature of reality. Mill responded with an inductivist critique; Whewell in turn defended his view. 30 This early debate goes to the heart of the issues. Why, after all, given his psychologistic epistemology, noted in the last section, does Mill reject Whewells view of hypotheses? Doesnt observation of the agent at work not just scientists but all of us all the time show that we constantly make inferences to the best explanation? Enumerative induction is taken by epistemic agents to yield warrants for belief, but so is the method of hypothesis. That was the lesson Whewell drew from his monumental history of the inductive sciences, and emphasised in his response to Mill. Given Mills naturalistic stance, it seems the question cannot be, is inference to the best explanation a source of warrant, but only in what circumstances it is, and what our criteria of a good explanation are. However the basic point that Mill urges against the hypothetical method is that hypotheses can be underdetermined by data. He does not question Whewells historical findings; he acknowledges the heuristic value of the Linguistic phenomenalism is the view that physicalistic statements can be translated without remainder into a language of phenomenal experience, whereas Mills view is that while what is true in our physicalistic statements is open to phenomenalist reduction, there remains a residue that must be explained as error. 29 We should note Schlick as an exception to these trends: he was a defender of scientific realism and physicalism about the mental (Schlick 1985). 30 Mill 1963-91, vol. VIII; Whewell 1860; see also Skorupski 1989, pp. 197-202, 206-12.
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hypothetical method as a source of useful models, fruitful lines of inquiry but denies that it is a source of warrant in its own right. In reply, Whewell denies that there is underdetermination. And certainly its not enough for Mill to make the simple point that there is always more than one hypothesis that is predictively adequate. The point has to be that given all natural constraints that we actually apply on what counts as a good explanation simplicity, coherence with the totality of our beliefs about the world, etc. there will or can be a plurality of best explanations. It can certainly be questioned whether we have grounds in the history of science for believing such a strong underdetermination thesis. Yet as a matter of sheer logic there is no way to rule it out. Nothing in the data can show that there is only one optimal explanation of them overall. How then can we claim that inference to the best explanation provides warrant for belief? Without metaphysical or theological backing, what could show that, in Peirces phrase, inquiry is fated to converge?31 These questions push powerfully, as they pushed Mill, towards an instrumentalist view of theory. That being so, it is striking that what in fact has happened is acceptance of the hypothetical method and scientific realism about its results. The philosophical response has not, typically, been metaphysical realism combined with instrumentalism about science, but rejection of a metaphysical realist view of truth combined with internal or empirical realism about the objects postulated by science.32 And that response, when combined with the possibility of strong underdetermination, seems to commit one to a kind of ontological relativism in principle. The long development we have just noted achieves a classic formulation in Quine. In this final phase of the Analytic school we still have verificationism, but now of a fully holistic kind, the integer of meaning now being the theory not the sentence.33 We have a deflationary, non-realist, conception of truth. We have the semantic conception of existence plus realism about abstract objects. But conventionalism is rejected34, and physicalism about experience is asserted. It seems that the driver for these developments has simply been the success of science itself. It has become ever less disputable that modern scientific theory is hypothetical in its methods and inextricably holistic in its outcomes. Philosophers can argue about its implications, for example for truth, but they increasingly take scientific realism for granted. Science sets the parameters of belief, undermining other claims to knowledge of how things really are, making it ever more difficult to sustain an instrumentalist interpretation of scientific theory. In short, the decline of reductive phenomenalism and neutral monism in favour of physicalism went hand in hand with the growth of scientific realism, and that in turn arose from the development of science, rather than the development of philosophy. The arc of development from the time of Mill to the time of Quine is singularly telling. My point however is not that realism about empirical mind- independent objects depends on inference to the best explanation, or even that For Whewells influence on Peirce see Fisch 1991, e.g. p. 110. 32 These are Hilary Putnams terms e.g. Putnam 1981. 33 Quine on Bentham: Five Milestones of Empiricism in Quine 1981. 34 Conventionalism required verificationism; but as Quine showed, the converse does not hold.
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inference to the best explanation is a way of vindicating such realism. I dont believe that either of these claims is true. There is a further contrast to be drawn, which also has a history. In British terms it is the contrast between a common sense and a scientific stance in philosophy (in continental terms, between a phenomenological and a scientific stance.) This contrast existed in British philosophy before the Analytic school, existed within the Analytic school, and exists in analytic philosophy today. In the 19th century, a tradition of philosopher-scientists represented the side of science, and the school of Reid represented common sense.35 Its representatives in the Analytic school might be Schlick, Russell, Carnap and Quine on the science side and Moore, Austin and Strawson on the phenomenological or common sense side. Now suppose we ask, why shouldnt a philosopher accept the hypothetical method and develop an account in which physics is derived by inference to the best explanation from subjective experience? Why hasnt this approach been more popular? The answer, it seems, is that it runs up against objections both from the side of science and from the side of common sense. On the scientific stance, the physics you arrive at, with its closure principles, seems to leave no room for the very data from which, on this account, it has been inferred. From the standpoint of physics, its very natural to marginalise the standpoint of subjective experience and take the data to be physical right from the start. From this standpoint, the earlier struggles by scientifically minded philosophers to reconcile science and phenomenology linguistic phenomenalism, neutral monism, ontological neutralism such as Carnaps seem redundant. From the common sense side, they seem equally misplaced. Common sense accepts the realism of the natural attitude. We know the material world around us because we perceive it. This is the natural realism that Sir William Hamilton contrasted with hypothetical realism,36 i.e. the view that our knowledge of physical objects requires an inference from experience. Hamilton thought this latter view was incoherent; Mill objected that it provided the only possible basis for natural realisms idea that we know a material world around us. But that response arose from Mills epistemological principles. A natural realist could argue that the principles were too narrow. After all, as Mill acknowledged, memory yields warrants for belief so why shouldnt one say the same about perceptual claims?37 That would be the common-sense path. The dualism of the scientific, and the phenomenological or common sense standpoint, persists. It plays to characteristically British preoccupations with the Mill, elusively many-sided as ever, is not easy to place. By and large he represents the scientific stance. Yet there is much on the other side, though it is not so much Reidian as Coleridgean. And of course Im not saying that any philosopher has to choose presumably some reconciliation is to be hoped for. 36 Hamilton 1859-60, passim. (Also hypothetical dualism, cosmothetic idealism.) 37 Mills answer was that to explain our beliefs he needed to postulate a reliable memory mechanism, but not a reliable mechanism whereby we perceive mind- independent objects.
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philosophy of perception on the one hand, and the philosophy of science on the other It remains a continuous preoccupation from the 19th to the 21st century. 5. Moral philosophy Of the two debates we have considered so far, the Analytic school played a leading role in the debate about non-empirical knowledge, putting forward distinctive and new ideas. In the second, concerning consciousness and science, philosophers of the Analytic school took a variety of positions: they were taking part in a complex, on-going development, although some of them made attempts to treat it in terms of new ideas that were distinctively Analytic most notably in Carnaps Aufbau. In the area of ethics and politics the story is different again. Neither ethics nor political theory were significant ingredients in the philosophical activity of the Analytic school, but Analytic doctrines about aprioricity and factuality had a lasting, and arguably baneful, effect on meta- ethics. True, both Moore and Wittgenstein had striking ethical ideas. At the very least, the last chapter of Moores Principia Ethica, on The Ideal, and Wittgensteins treatment of ethics in the Tractatus and the Lecture on Ethics38 are significant documents of their time. In a historical interpretation of the Analytic school as a phenomenon of modernism they would be among the prime, though not the only, evidence. Moores quietist elitism, which finds the absolute good in beauty and friendship, and Wittgensteins quietist mysticism of the ethical as inexpressible belong to the spirit of early modernism. Moreover, their ethical ideas feel integral to their whole philosophical outlook. They are part of what one has to grasp in grasping them as philosophers and in grasping their attractiveness as philosophers. In contrast, the political engagements of Neurath, Carnap and Russell did not form a part of their philosophical position in the same way (unless one sees Viennese socialist construction as going in some way with Viennese language construction). The ethical ideas of Moore and Wittgenstein are personally felt and philosophically worked-through contributions to the characteristic texture of early modernism, whereas in ethics and politics the other three feel like intelligent and aware people responding to prevailing ideas, rather than creating them. It would be surprising if Moores and Wittgensteins ethical attitudes lost influence completely, since both forms of quietism express perennial attitudes towards life and world. At the moment, however, it must be said that they have little influence in analytic moral philosophy, though not none. In contrast, the importance of Analytic school doctrines for meta-ethics has been enormous, and traceable. The conventionalist and realist strands in the Analytic school force a choice between non-cognitivism or realism about all normative claims. Wittgensteins view both of tautologies and of the ethical is an unusual kind of non-cognitivism. Carnaps conventionalism about epistemic principles is another. Where cognitivists see us asserting true or false principles of epistemic warrant, the conventionalist sees us as expressing a rule, commitment, decision
38

Wittgenstein 1961, 1975; see also 1979, e.g. pp 115-17. 14

that has no truth-apt content. The application of these ideas to ethical as well as epistemological principles has been obvious from the start. Equally, the possibility of transferring realism from mathematics to ethics is obvious: comparison with mathematical realism has been a major trope for moral realists. I am sceptical whether either of these positions about normative claims, non-cognitivism or realism, can be attributed to any philosopher before the 20th century. It was the Analytic school that produced the appearance of an exhaustive choice of non-cognitivism or realism about the normative. This could work either through the logical-positivist dichotomy between factual assertion and non-factual expression, or by way of realism about truth and propositionhood. But to interpret Kant, Mill or Reid in terms of this dichotomy is anachronistic. 39 To clarify, we should distinguish cognitivism from realism. Cognitivism is the view that normative claims are truth-apt objects of belief. Realism is the view that they are factual claims: that what makes them true, when they are true, is the substantive fact, natural or non-natural, that they assert obtains. Reid and Kant are cognitivists about epistemology and ethics, but it by no means follows that they are realists. They didnt focus on the issue in this way, nor were they working with the conceptual tools and the problematic that would cause them to do so. The same can be said for Mill. Insofar as one can impute meta-normative views to them at all, they have nothing to do with any of the common current options expressivism, or naturalistic or non-naturalistic realism. The same can be said for Sidgwick, and indeed for the Moore of Principia Ethica.40 While these philosophers may have taken it for granted that normative claims are true or false assertions, it does not follow that they thought them to be factual assertions. And they may have been right about that. If their views run up against the realist conception of truth or the semantic conception of existence, then perhaps it is these Analytic ideas that have to go; in any case we should be cautious in attributing those ideas to them. But let us turn back to normative ethics. If Moores and Wittgensteins conceptions of ethical life do not currently make much impact in analytic moral philosophy, nor do those of 20th century continental moral theorists. In contrast, the continuing influence of the British tradition is quite obvious. Once again it seems to me that one can see this in terms of the rise and fall of modernism. The most prominent ethical ideas of the 20th century on the continent belong to the modernist culture of its first fifty or sixty years. British moral philosophy played no major role in this culture; rather it continued in the traditions that came before. That is not to say that it contained nothing new: the views of Moore, Ross, Ewing and Prichard on the concepts of value and moral obligation were Equally, although one can see elements of non-cognitivism and of a dispositionalist realism in Hume, it seems to me too strong to attribute to him a clear endorsement of either of these positions. 40 Moore is thought to have been a paradigm realist in Principia Ethica; in fact however his view of ethical predicates seems to have been irrealist. He denies, for example, that good must denote some real property of things (p. 191). See Baldwin 2010.
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innovative, and have become much appreciated.41 Still, the normative framework was largely set by continued discussion between utilitarians and moral intuitionists or pluralists: the debate that had also dominated the 19th century. These British themes remain important in current ethical theory. And in political theory the influence of Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Mill, Green remains. But since the 60s new influences have arrived. Above all there is the new interest in the ethics of Kant. This revival of Kantian ethics in the English-language world is a phenomenon of post-60s American liberalism. The principal animator has been Rawls, though in political theory another important factor has been the recovery of Marx. But these movements are part of a great widening of horizons since the 60s. Other revivals in normative ethics include Aristotle, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche. The contrast with the virtual absence of normative ethics in the Analytic school is striking indeed. 6. Concluding thoughts British 19th century philosophy had little influence on the distinctive ideas of the Analytic school, even though Britain was home to some of its greatest 20th century figures. Equally, however, many of those ideas, in particular verificationism and the idea that philosophy consists of pseudo-problems, seem for the moment at least exhausted, indeed positively unfashionable, within analytic philosophy itself. In striking contrast, positions that have always been important in British philosophy, independently of the Analytic school, have returned as leading positions in analytic philosophy now. We can see that in all the three areas we have discussed (A) the nature of non-empirical knowledge, (B) science, consciousness and perception, and (C) ethics. Looked at from a British perspective we might see the main continuity in analytic philosophy as a continuity of British preoccupations in the face of an advancing, and then receding, modernist tide. However this would grossly underestimate just how big and pluralistic the world of analytic philosophy has come to be. Many other ideas inhabit its space. The British background is only one of the backgrounds to current analytic philosophy that need to be taken into account. A full review of 19th century philosophy, continental as well as Anglo-American, is required to situate current philosophy properly in its historical background. This is beyond our remit, but we can end by considering some limits of the British philosophical tradition, and some sources of reflection in current philosophy that come from outside those limits. Just as in epistemology and metaphysics so in moral philosophy the British dialectic is a dialectic of common sense and science, or in the case of ethics, of common science and theoretical perspectives that aim at a science of ethics. That, in a way, is its true glory. Importantly however, in both areas spiritual questions about the meaning of life, whether humanistic, religious, or post-humanistic and post-religious, are relatively absent as determinants of

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See e.g. Hurka 2011. 16

philosophy.42 Connectedly, distancing perspectives on both common sense and science, whether Critical in origin, or deriving from Absolute idealist rethinkings of religion, are relatively absent. (The brief period of British idealism is the exception.) Thus, for example, the fact that these perspectives are not missing from Wittgensteins thought, however elusive or repressed they may be, is part of what distinguishes him from the British tradition, and indeed makes him as much a continental as an analytic philosopher. In many ways one can say that the mainstream of analytic philosophy continues in these strengths and limits. At the same time, however, it is becoming less clear how much sense it makes to talk about a mainstream. Analytic philosophy is thinning and widening thematically to a pluralism in which it is no longer very clear what the point of the word analytic is, as we noted at the beginning of this discussion. And to a considerable extent this widening is a matter of bringing in Critical and idealist themes, and questions about how to live, what it means to live. Who knows whether significant new directions in philosophy will emerge from this pluralism, or whether it will turn out to be a period of eclecticism and dissipation. Still, at least we live in interesting times, in which dogmatism and narrow-mindedness find it that much harder to flourish. REFERENCES Austin, J. L. 1962a. Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1962b. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baldwin, Thomas (ed). 1993. G. E. Moore: Selected Writings., London: Routledge. Baldwin, Thomas. 2010. The Open Question Argument. In John Skorupski, ed. The Routledge Companion to Ethics, London: Routledge, pp. 286-296. Bell, David. 1999. The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup? In Anthony OHear, ed., German Philosophy since Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brentano, Franz. 1995. Psychology from an empirical standpoint. London: Routledge. (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874) Brentano, Franz. 1867. Die Psychologie des Aristotles. Mainz: Verlag von Franz Kirchheim. Capaldi, Nicholas. 2004. John Stuart Mill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coffa, Alberto. 1991. The Semantic Tradition From Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carnap, Rudolf. 1967. The Logical Structure of the World (also includes PseudoProblems in Philosophy). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Translation of Der Logische Aufbau der Welt and Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie, both published in 1928. As determinants of philosophy. I dont mean they are absent as such: one has only to consider Mills openness to romantic influence and Sidgwicks existential worries about the dualism of the practical reason. But Mill did not become a German idealist philosopher (pace Capaldi 2004), and Sidgwick did not solve his problems by a philosophical search for transcendence (as against empirical research into psychic phenomena).
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Dummett, M. 1978. Truth and Other Enigmas. London: Duckworth. Fisch, Menachem. 1991. William Whewell Philosopher of Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Frege, G. 1953. Foundations of Arithmetic (Second Revised Edition). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Friedman, Michael. 1991. 'The Re-evaluation of Logical Positivism,' In Journal of Philosophy, 10: 505 - 519. Gellner, E. 1979. Words and Things, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Revised edition; original edition published in 1959.) Hamilton, Sir William. 1859-60. Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, Edinburgh and London: Blackwood. Hume, D. 1874. A Treatise of Human Nature and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, edited with preliminary dissertation and notes by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose. London: Longmans, Green. Hurka, Thomas, ed. 2011. Underivative Duty: British Moral Philosophers from Sidgwick to Ewing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laudan, L. 1981. Science and Hypothesis, Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Meinong, A. 1960. The Theory of Objects in Roderick M. Chisholm (ed.), Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. (Translation of Meinong, ber Gegenstandstheorie, 1904.) Mill, J. S. 1963 91. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. London: Routledge Moore, G. E. 1899. The Nature of Judgement. Mind, 8, 176-93. Reprinted in Baldwin, ed. 1993, 1 19. Moore, G.E. 1993. Principia Ethica, Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (First published 1903.) Moore, G. E. 1925. A Defence of Common Sense in J. H. Muirhead (ed.) Contemporary British Philosophy (2nd series), London: Allen and Unwin, 193- 223. Reprinted in Baldwin, ed. 1993, 106 33. Moore, G. E. 1939. Proof of an External World, in Proceedings of the British Academy 25, 273-300. Reprinted in Baldwin, ed. 1993, 147-70. Priest, G. 2008. The Closing of the Mind: How the Particular Quantifier Became Existentially Loaded Behind our Backs, Review of Symbolic Logic 1: 42-55. Putnam, H. 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, W. V. O. 1948. On What there Is. Review of Metaphysics, 48: 21-38. Quine, W. V. O. 1981. Theories and Things. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Universiyt Press. Schlick, M. 1985 (first published ) General Theory of Knowledge. Skorupski, John. 1989. John Stuart Mill. London: Routledge 1997. 'Meaning, Verification, Use.' In Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, eds., The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Blackwell, 29 - 59. 2005. 'Later Empiricism and Logical Positivism.' In Stewart Shapiro, ed., The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Mathematics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 51-74. Strawson, P. F. 1950. On Referring, in Mind 59: 320-44. Strawson, P. F. 1952. Introduction to Logical Theory. London: Methuen. Stroud, Barry. 1984. The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Whewell, William. 1860. On the Philosophy of Discovery, London: Parker & Son. Wittgenstein, L. 1961 (1921).Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. 1965. A Lecture on Ethics, The Philosophical Review, 74, pp. 3- 12 Wittgenstein, L. 1974. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. 1979. Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Oxford: Blackwell. Wolenski, Jan. 1989. Logic and philosophy in the Lvov-Warsaw school, Dordrecht, London: Kluwer.

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