Philosophy and Philosophers - an Introduction to Western Philosophy - Chapter 12
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CHAPTER TWELVE
Recent philosophy
By “recent philosophy” is here meant philosophy since roughly 1945.
Some of the most significant figures of this period have already been
looked at in some detail in earlier chapters. There will be no attempt
here to discern the detail of trends or tendencies in recent philosophy;
but it can at least be said that recent philosophy is extremely diverse in
its interests and approaches. So in covering the period from 1945 to the
present day in a single chapter I will cite some of the more prominent
names and state briefly what they stand for. There is, no doubt, room
for disagreement over which figures should be selected and which
omitted; there is no question of this choice being definitive. The people
mentioned are discussed in chronological order according to their date
of birth, and main works by the philosophers mentioned are given in
the bibliography.
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle (1900–76) was part of a philosophical movement that held
that many philosophical problems arose from a misunderstanding and
misuse of ordinary language. One of the ways in which such misunderstandings
arise is through what Ryle calls “category mistakes”,
whereby we mistakenly take a concept to refer to a certain kind of
entity. Generally this leads to mistaken ontological commitments, that
is, to the existence of all sorts of entities which we are misled into
supposing exist owing to the way we misunderstand our language.
Ryle applies this view to his theory of mind: his opposition to mind as
a ghostly object-like substance. We take the term “mind” to refer to
some special, albeit ethereal, kind of thing. But the mind is not any
kind of thing; it is not a thing at all; rather, to talk of mind is to refer to
certain kinds of behaviour and dispositions to behave. This has led to
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Ryle’s views being dubbed behaviourist; but this is a label he rejects as
indicating a misunderstanding of his views.
Nelson Goodman
Nelson Goodman (1906– ) is a philosopher with a background in
mathematical logic. His overall philosophical conclusions have led him
to a form of relativism, but a relativism within “rigorous restraints”.
Goodman’s argument is that there can be no way of choosing between
different versions of the world by a direct comparison with a world
that is independent of all versions—all descriptions and depictions—
for there can be no such “world”. What we aim at in world-views is
not truth—that would tend to lead us to the construction of a trivial
disconnected inventory; rather, our view or “world-making” always
involves simplification and abstraction where what is important is
“rightness”, which seems to consist of correctness of “fit” within a
world-view. The choice between different systems or world-views
introduces a battery of criteria; but it is questionable whether these
criteria, if they are given determinate content only within systems, can
avoid irrational relativism.
W.V.O.Quine
W.V.O.Quine (1908– ) is a philosopher much of whose earlier work was
in the philosophy of mathematics and mathematical logic. Quine
agrees with Russell that ordinary language requires “regimentation”
into a clearer logical language which makes the minimum of
ontological presuppositions so that we do not find ourselves
committed, merely because of the grammar of the language we use, to
assuming the existence of various entities. Linguistic expressions such
as names, whose meanings seem to presuppose the existence of the
objects to which they refer, can be replaced by descriptions whereby it
becomes a matter of fact whether anything actually satisfies those
descriptions. Quine has also attacked the analytic/synthetic
distinction, and the view that there is an absolutely non-theoretical
basic language which refers to immediate experience. Quine replaces
this view with a holistic theory of meaning and knowledge: the sense
and epistemological standing of a statement can only be assessed in
relation to its position and entrenchment in the whole system of
statements which is present knowledge, which Quine identifies as “the
whole of science”. Statements about the external world answer to or
confront experience as a whole; we can always hang on to any
statement we like as true provided we are willing, so as to maintain
consistency, to make big enough changes elsewhere in the system.
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J.L.Austin
J.L.Austin (1911–60), like Ryle, thought that philosophical problems
tended to arise from a misunderstanding of language. Unlike Ryle he
did not attempt to replace the systematic philosophies which arose
from what he saw as the inattention to fine distinctions of language
with a systematic philosophy derived from a view of language purged
of such inattention. Austin supposed that philosophy and logic were
too ready to ignore the subtle discriminations present in ordinary
language. This led to the careful study of shades of meaning manifest
in linguistic usage which would be not only a way of avoiding
philosophical error but also of interest in its own right.
Stuart Hampshire
Stuart Hampshire (1914– ) has put forward a theory of language and
knowledge which is relativistic in that the system of concepts which
we bring to talk about the world is not absolute or fixed, but depends
upon the special interests we bring to the world as human beings and
as agents in the world. We cannot detach ourselves as disembodied
spectators and so achieve a disinterested view of the world. He rejects
the view that the more we know about the causes of our actions the
less free we will become; on the contrary, it is the essence of our
existence as human beings always to be able to stand back from
knowledge of our situation, no matter how detailed, and decide what
we then want to do.
Donald Davidson
Donald Davidson (1917– ) has been notably influential on certain parts
of analytical philosophy in recent years. Much of his work has centred
on the philosophy of language, and the implications of this work for
various other areas of philosophy, such as the philosophy of mind. In
the philosophy of mind he argues for an “anomalous monism” where,
although each mental event is identical with a physical event, there are
no strict law-like connections between the two different sorts of
descriptions of events.
P.F.Strawson
P.F.Strawson (1919– ) has been one of the chief opponents of the idea
that logic somehow represents in an ideal form the structure of
Austin, Hampshire, Davidson, Strawson 307
ordinary language. Strawson’s investigations into the informal logic
of ordinary language led him to what he called “descriptive
metaphysics”, which aims to lay bare the most basic features of the
conceptual system we actually have; that is, those features of our
conceptual system which are a historically unchanging core; this is to
be contrasted with “revisionary metaphysics”, which aims to change
or replace the conceptual structure we actually have with a better
one. It is from these considerations that Strawson’s project has been
seen as having an affinity with the Kantian one of making manifest
the common core of conceptual presuppositions logically required for
our talk about the world; however, in Strawson’s case the aim is the
less ambitious one of identifying the logical requirements relative to
our conceptual system, that is, the concepts logically presupposed by
our conceptual system, not by any conceptual system whatsoever. For
example Strawson concludes that the possibility of a world in which
we re-identify various categories of kinds of particular things
depends upon the category of material bodies in space and time.
Strawson has also written against the correspondence theory of truth:
the function of saying “p is true” is not to describe p as having some
special relation with the world, but rather to say that one confirms or
endorses p.
Thomas S.Kuhn
Thomas S.Kuhn (1922– ) was trained as a physicist and has been
extremely influential in the philosophy of both the physical and social
sciences; in this respect he is second only to Popper. His chief thesis
involves suggesting that science is not the tidy rational enterprise it is
sometimes represented as being by philosophers. Scientists most of the
time engage in “puzzle-solving” or “normal science” within a set of
currently unquestioned assumptions about the world which forms a
“paradigm” or world-view. The “anomalies” presented by experience
are in normal science accommodated within the assumptions defining
the paradigm. But eventually the anomalies become too troublesome.
The choice of paradigms, the revolutionary movement between them
being called a “paradigm shift”, is difficult to justify rationally because
the standards of rationality, methodology, and what constitutes good
evidence are determined within each paradigm. Many have seen
Kuhn’s view as an admission of relativism because of the rational
incommensurability of paradigms, and as an undermining of the
rationality of science.
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Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend (1924– ) is a philosopher whose training was
originally in theoretical physics. His main work has been in
epistemology and the philosophy of science. The chief outcome of his
work has been to criticize the view that there is something called “the
scientific method”, and thus to release human investigations into the
nature of the world from the presupposition that there is only one
rational way of going about such investigations. There is no pure way
of describing the world independently of conceptual and theoretical
assumptions, which leaves us with the possibility of there being a
variety of conceptual systems between which there can be no means of
adjudication ultimately independent of all theoretical assumptions.
This has led to a view of Feyerabend as a methodological anarchist.
But his position is best described as that of a democratic relativist
which, he suggests, frees inquiry from the shackles of supposing there
is only one correct method of understanding the world.
Michael Dummett
The two most important aspects of Michael Dummett’s (1925– )
philosophical doctrines are his search for a systematic theory of
meaning and his anti-realism. The knowledge we display of the
meaning of expressions is based on the implicit knowledge of
linguistic principles, and it is the function of a theory of meaning to
bring these to light. The proposition central to the notion of antirealism
is the assertion that there are certain classes of statements
which are not determinately true or false independently of our means
of knowing which they are. This amounts to a denial of the principle of
bivalence which says that any statement must be determinately either
true or false regardless of whether we can know which it is.
Richard Rorty
Much of Richard Rorty’s (1931– ) recent work has been concerned with
examining the nature of the philosophical enterprise itself. This has led
him to question the presuppositions that lie behind much of what he
identifies as the philosophical tradition. The philosophical approaches
that are chiefly criticized are analytical philosophy and continental
phenomenology; philosophy in these traditions he sees as a kind of
dead end where there is no possible way of adjudicating between
different views. In particular Rorty suggests that the central error of
the philosophical tradition of which he is critical is the attempt to hold
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a mirror up to nature in which is reflected the nature of the world in a
way that is ahistorical, spectatorial, and independent of any
perspective. But we cannot escape our historical and human
perspective. Rorty advocates that we replace traditional “systematic”
philosophy, which aims at timelessly true foundations (represented by
such figures as Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Russell), with “edifying”
philosophy (represented by such figures as Heidegger, Wittgenstein,
Dewey, Sartre), whose central job is the freeing and facilitation of
dialogue between different areas of human inquiry in the historical
context in which they find themselves.
John R.Searle
Much of the work of John R.Searle (1932– ) has been in the philosophy
of language, but he has also done important work in the philosophy of
mind and the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence.
Central to Searle’s work in the philosophy of language is that of
“speech acts” (which partly develops the pioneering work of Austin),
which are distinguished by their point or purpose; expressions with
similar content fall into different types of speech act depending on
what is done with them: whether they are orders, promises, pleas,
descriptions, predictions and the like. Searle aims to produce a
taxonomy of speech acts.
Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke (1940– ) is a philosopher trained in mathematical logic;
his work in modal logic has led him to revive a form of essentialism
and reintroduce the concept of natural or metaphysical necessity.
Necessity is said, especially by empiricists and logical positivists,
only to hold among the propositions of mathematics, logic and
semantic truths (such as “All bachelors are unmarried”), not among
objects or events in the world, and all propositions concerning the
actual nature of the world are contingent. Kripke thinks mistaken the
view of some philosophers that the a priori and the a posteriori, and
the necessary and contingent, are, respectively, coextensive. The
distinctions belong to different philosophical domains: knowledge
and metaphysics. There are, Kripke argues, necessarily true
statements which cannot be known to be true merely through
understanding the meanings of the terms involved, but can be known
only through experience a posteriori. In particular there are
expressions that Kripke calls “rigid designators”, which name the
same individual in every possible world in which that individual
310 Recent philosophy
exists, and which form identity statements, such as “The Morning
Star is identical with the Evening Star”, which are necessary but
knowable only a posteriori. He reintroduces essentialism: the notion
that particular objects and kinds of objects have necessary properties:
that is, those properties something must have to be just that object or
that sort of object.
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