Dummett Meaning As Use Notes

Michael Dummett - Truth and other enigmas

Can Analytic Philosophy be Systematic, and Ought it to Be?

• Systematic:

  • primarily means demonstrating a system of thought etc; a positive or normative theory

  • also means adhering to an accepted methodology

• Can analytic philosophy be systematic (in the first sense)?

  • yes, according to many American analytic philosophers such as Quine,

    • analytic philosophy is ‘at least cognate with the natural sciences’

  • no, according to the later Wittgenstein and Austin

    • sciences aim to establish truths, whereas philosophy aims to clarify conceptual confusion; to replace a distorted vision with an undistorted one; to untangle

      • ‘to possess a concept is to be the master of a certain fragment of language’, hence if we are to do philosophy, we must understand language

        • e.g. we must make explicit the implicit rules and principles of language

      • philosophy does not tell us anything about what ‘is to be seen’ (what exists?); once the tangle is unpicked, the philosopher’s work is done

• Austin rejects system through a total reliance on the actual uses of words

  • if we study uses of words well enough without paying attention to ‘the problems’, they will solve themselves

  • this is an unattractive viewpoint these days (1975)

• Brief history of analytic philosophy

  • analytic philosophy is a cluster of schools, less disparate now (1975) than it once was. There are three primary reasons for this:

    • 1. acceptance of the primacy and importance of Frege as the first analytic philosopher

    • 2. American philosophers now big in Britain

    • 3. the focus of philosophy has moved from linguistic philosophy - which assumed understanding of language and used it as a means (e.g. Austin?) - to philosophy of language: the attempt to generate a theory of language

• Frege shifted the starting point in philosophy from epistemology to logic and language

  • it is only through the analysis of language that we can analyse thought

    • thoughts, as opposed to other mental objects, appear to be wholly communicable

    • we can only clearly understand thought thought through language - attempting to penetrate to the naked essence of the thought will lead to confusion between the thought and the subjective accompaniments of thinking

    • in other words, pure, clear thought is necessarily filtered through language. If we are to understand thought, we must necessarily understand language

      • for Frege and Wittgenstein, understanding of language is necessary and sufficient in order to understand thought - i.e. with that understanding, philosophy is complete

• The linguistic schools of analytic philosophy quickly stopped making contributions to theories of language

  • e.g. logical positivists used the principle of verification as a weapon, without ever clearly outlining the coherent/complete theory of meaning or philosophy of language from which it came

  • the ordinary language school took Wittgenstein’s slogan ‘Meaning is use’ to reject any unitary theory of meaning

    • meaning can only be deciphered sentence by sentence, according to use

      • this must be incorrect as an account of language, because we do not learn sentences one by one

      • this led to remarkably superficial accounts of use that presupposed an understanding of concepts e.g. truth, expression of an attitude, conveyance of a belief etc. A theory of meaning is supposed to explain such concepts

      • this disregarded the semantic/pragmatic distinction, the distinction between what a statement says literally and what it may be meant to convey in a particular situation

        • according to meaning-is-use, semantic meaning is illegitimate

    • this was inconsistent and the school ended up creating new distinctions to replace the ones they had rejected, before disintegrating

• The ordinary language school caricatured Wittgenstein’s ideas (but not grossly)

  • ...

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