Soames - 2015;2003;

PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSISIN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS

in the

TWENTIETHCENTURY

VOLUME 2

THE AGE OF MEANING

Scott Soames

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2003 by Princeton University Press
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eISBN: 978-1-40082-580-6

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Soames, Scott.

Philosophical analysis in the twentieth century/Scott Soames.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 2. The age of meaning.
ISBN: 0-691-11574-5 (v. 2: alk. paper)
1. Analysis (Philosophy) 2. MethodologyHistory20th century.
3. PhilosophyHistory20th century. I. Title.
B808.5 S63 2003 2002042724

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This book has been composed in Galliard

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED

TO MY SON

BRIAN

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LIKE VOLUME 1, this volume grew out of a lecture course for upper-division undergraduates and beginning graduate students given several times at Princeton Universitythis one in 1998, 2000, and 2002. As such, it has benefited from those who attended the lectures and participated in discussions connected with them. In addition, I am very grateful to five people for reading and commenting on the manuscript of Volume 2my Princeton colleagues, Professors Mark Greenberg and Gil Harman, Professor John Hawthorne of Rutgers University, my longtime friend and philosophical confidant Professor Ali Kazmi of the University of Calgary, and my Ph.D. student Jeff Speaks. All five read the manuscript carefully and provided me with detailed and extremely helpful criticisms. In addition, Ali and Jeff spent many hours with me discussing important philosophical issues connected with it. Without the contributions of these five philosophers, this work would have been much poorer. As with Volume 1, the people at Princeton University Pressparticularly, Jodi Beder, Ian Malcolm, and Debbie Tegardendid an outstanding job, and contributed much to the final shape of the work. Finally, I would again like to express my appreciation to Martha, who means so much to me, for all she has added both to my life and to the creation of these volumes.

INTRODUCTION

OVERVIEW AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Overview of the Period

This volume continues the story of the leading developments in twentieth-century analytic philosophy begun in volume 1, which ended with the mid-century views of W. V. Quine. Taking up where that one left off, this volume covers the period starting roughly with Ludwig Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953 but completed several years earlier, and ending about the time of Saul Kripkes Naming and Necessity, originally given as three lectures at Princeton University in 1970. Topics covered will include the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, the ordinary language school of Gilbert Ryle, John L. Austin, Peter Strawson, Richard M. Hare, and Norman Malcolm, the attack on the ordinary language school led by Paul Grice and the recognition of the need to distinguish meaning from use, Quines naturalism and skepticism about meaning, Donald Davidsons systematic theory of truth and meaning, and Kripkes reconceptualization of fundamental semantic and philosophical categories.

The period studied in these two volumes has the distinction of being old enough to be not quite contemporary, while recent enough not to have achieved the venerable status of history. This makes for an interesting combination. On the one hand, we have achieved enough distance to be able to look back at the work done in the period and begin to form an overall picture of what was achieved and what was missed. On the other hand, since the philosophers studied in these volumes still cast long shadows over current debates, the critical overview we develop should be relevant to contemporary discussions in philosophy. This will, I think, become more apparent as we move through volume 2, and begin to encounter conceptual advances that not only ushered in a new philosophical future, but also transformed our view of our analytic past.

The period discussed in volume 2 begins with the ascendancy of two leading ideas, both growing out of Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations. The first was that philosophical problems are due solely to the misuse of language. Thus, the job of the philosopher is not to construct elaborate theories to solve philosophical problems, but to expose the linguistic confusions that fooled us into thinking there were genuine problems to be solved in the first place. The second leading idea was that meaning itselfthe key to progress in philosophywas not to be studied from a theoretical or abstract scientific perspective. Rather than constructing general theories of meaning, philosophers were supposed to attend to subtle aspects of language use, and to show how misuse of certain words leads to philosophical perplexity and confusion. So what we have at the outset is a remarkable combination of views: all of philosophy depends on a proper understanding of meaning, but there is no systematic theory of meaning, or method of studying it, other than by informally assembling observations about aspects of the use of particular philosophically significant words in more or less ordinary situations.

As one might have guessed, this combination of views proved to be unstable. There are too many factors in addition to meaning that influence when and how particular words are used in order for us to draw philosophically useful conclusions primarily from piecemeal observations about ordinary use. What is needed is some sort of systematic theory of what meaning is, and how it interacts with these other factors governing the use of language. This insight was something that gradually emerged during the 1950s and early 1960s as ordinary language philosophers wrestled with their dilemma. Two important milestones on the way were the development of the theory of speech acts by John L. Austin, and the work on conversational implicature by Paul Grice, both of which we will say something about in this volume.

The end result was that at a certain point philosophers who were convinced that philosophical problems were simply linguistic problems came to recognize that they needed a systematic theory of meaning. However, it was unclear whether such a theory was possible, or, if it was, what it should look like. At the time, skepticism on the matter was fueled by Quines highly influential arguments in Word and Object and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, which reject our ordinary notions of meaning and reference as scientifically hopeless, while proposing radically deflated substitutes. Meaning, as Quine conceived of it, was not the center of anything, certainly not philosophy. However, his was not the only voice. In the early 1960s an important development took place. Philosophers working in a different tradition, growing out of the development of formal logic, came up with a philosophical conception of meaning that many found irresistible. The conception was formulated by Donald Davidson, who conceived of a theory of meaning as a systematic theory of the truth conditions of the sentences of a language. To many this seemed like precisely the thing that was needed to fulfill the conception of philosophy as the analysis of meaningno matter that the conception of meaning employed was a descendant of one that the later Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers who followed him had earlier rejected as irrelevant.