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      One might try to see in contemporary metaphysics a Quinean breakdown of divisions between philosophy and the natural sciences. But if it is metaphysics naturalized, then so is the metaphysics of Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz. Armchair argument retains a central role, as do the modal notions of metaphysical possibility and necessity. Although empirical knowledge constrains the attribution of essential properties, results are more often reached through a subtle interplay of logic and the imagination. The crucial experiments are thought experiments.

      Wiggins is not just stating the obvious, that language and meaning are part of the world because everything is part of the world. Rather, his point is that in defi ning words – natural kind terms, for instance – we must point at real specimens. What there is determines what there is for us to mean. In knowing what we mean, we know something about what there is. That prompts the question how far the analysis of thought or language can be pursued autonomously with any kind of methodological priority.

      After this preliminary sketch, it is time to get down to detailed work. The next three chapters examine different forms of the linguistic or conceptual turn. Chapter 2 uses a case study to consider in a microcosm the idea that philosophers’ questions are implicitly about language or thought when they are not explicitly so. Chapters 3 and 4 assess a wide range of versions of the idea that the armchair methodology of philosophy is grounded in the analytic or conceptual status of a core of philosophical truths, which need not be about language or thought, even implicitly. In each case the upshot is negative. Although philosophers have more reason than physicists to consider matters of language or thought, philosophy is in no deep sense a linguistic or conceptual inquiry, any more than physics is. But it does not follow that experiment is an appropriate primary method for philosophy. Similar arguments suggest that mathematics is in no deep sense a linguistic or conceptual inquiry, yet experiment is not an appropriate primary method for mathematics. The second half of the book develops an alternative conception of philosophy, on which a largely armchair methodology remains defensible, as it does for mathematics.

      From this perspective and that of many contemporary philosophers, the conceptual turn and a fortiori the linguistic turn look like wrong turnings. It is pointless to deny that such philosophers are “analytic,” for that term is customarily applied to a broad, loose tradition held together by an intricate network of causal ties of influence and communication, not by shared essential properties of doctrine or method: what do Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Ayer, Quine, Austin, Strawson, Davidson, Rawls, Williams, Anscombe, Geach, Armstrong, Smart, Fodor, Dummett, Wiggins, Marcus, Hintikka, Kaplan, Lewis, Kripke, Fine, van Inwagen and Stalnaker all have in common to distinguish them from all the nonanalytic philosophers? Many who regard the linguistic and conceptual turns as serious mistakes have ties of influence and communication that put them squarely within that tradition. “Analytic philosophy” is a phrase in a living language; the attempt to stipulate a sense for it that excludes many of the philosophers just listed will achieve nothing but brief terminological confusion.

      Notes

      1 1 Ayer’s three immediate predecessors were John Cook Wilson, H. H. Joachim and H. H. Price.

      2 2 The “absolute” is to distinguish these forms of idealism from the corresponding ‘subjective’ forms, in which concepts are replaced by psychological processes.

      3 3 Although McDowell is sometimes classifi ed as a ‘post-analytic’ philosopher, he fi nds his own way to accept Dummett’s ‘fundamental tenet of analytical philosophy,’ that “philosophical questions about thought are to be approached through language” (1994: 125).

      4 4 McDowell’s invocation of humility (1994: 40) addresses contingent limitations, not necessary ones.

      5 5 Mark Johnston (1993: 96–7) discusses “the Enigmas, entities essentially undetectable by us.” He stipulates that they are collectively as well as individually undetectable; thus our elusive objects need not be his Enigmas. If we cannot have good evidence that

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