The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, Volume 2: A New Vision

438 Pages·2017·3.56 MB·English

by  Scott Soames

The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy
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The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy
• •
V O L U M E 2
A N E W V I S I O N
•SCOTT SOAMES•

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street
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ISBN 978- 0- 691- 16003- 0
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FOR MARTHA, BRIAN, AND GREG
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CONTENTS
• •
Preface ix
PART ONE
THE TRACTATUS:
LANGUAGE, MIND, AND WORLD
CHAPTER 1
The Abbreviated Metaphysics of the Tractatus 3
CHAPTER 2
The Single Great Problem of the Tractatus: Propositions 24
CHAPTER 3
The Logic of the Tractatus 55
CHAPTER 4
The Tractarian Test of Intelligibility and Its Consequences 88
PART TWO
A NEW CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY:
LANGUAGE, LOGIC, AND SCIENCE
CHAPTER 5
The Roots of Logical Empiricism 107
CHAPTER 6
Carnap’s Aufbau 129
CHAPTER 7
The Heyday of Logical Empiricism 160
CHAPTER 8
Advances in Logic: Gödel, Tarski, Church, and Turing 199
CHAPTER 9
Tarski’s Definition of Truth and Carnap’s Embrace of “Semantics” 236
CHAPTER 10
Analyticity, Necessity, and A Priori Knowledge 288
viii • Contents •
CHAPTER 11
The Rise and Fall of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning 311
PART THREE
IS ETHICS POSSIBLE?
CHAPTER 12
Ethics as Science 337
CHAPTER 13
Replacing Ethics with Metaethics: Emotivism and Its Critics 353
CHAPTER 14
Normative Ethics and Cognitivist Metaethics in the Age
of Emotivism: H. A. Prichard and W. D. Ross 375
References 409
Index 419
PREFACE
• •
This volume continues the story of the early years of the analytic tra-
dition in philosophy told in volume 1. There I chronicled the devel-
opment of symbolic logic by Frege and Russell, its application to the
philosophy of mathematics and the analysis of language, and the efforts
by Moore and Russell to refute Absolute Idealism, to beat back American
Pragmatism, and to establish a philosophical paradigm based on rigor-
ous conceptual and logical analysis. Although aspects of their emerging
paradigm— particularly Russell’s logicized version of it— were new, the
conception of philosophy it served was not. The aim was to use new an-
alytic means to solve traditional problems of ethics, epistemology, and
metaphysics. That changed with the publication of Wittgenstein’s Tracta-
tus Logico- Philosophicus in 1922, its assimilation by the early Vienna Circle
of Schlick, Carnap, and Hahn in the 1920s, and the flowering of logical
empiricism in the 1930s. For many philosophers of this new era, analy-
sis wasn’t a philosophical tool; it was philosophy. Analysis wasn’t (offi-
cially) in the service of advancing philosophical theories or developing
philosophical worldviews, which, according to the new orthodoxy, must
inevitably exceed the limits of intelligibility. Although analysis could be
useful in puncturing philosophical illusions, its chief (official) purpose—
sketched in the logical empiricists’ 1929 proclamation, “The Scientific
Conception of the World”— was to formalize, systematize, and unify sci-
ence. This volume explores the major successes and failures of the philoso-
phers of that era.
Chapter 1 sets the stage by comparing Russell’s conception of philoso-
phy in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism with Wittgenstein’s conception in
the Tractatus. Although both are versions of logical atomism, the former
uses analytic techniques to arrive at a philosophical theory of the world,
while the latter uses them to arrive at a philosophical theory of thought
and language. Because Russell aimed to explain what reality must be like
if our reported knowledge of it is to be genuine, his analyses yielded an
analytic metaphysics. Because Wittgenstein aimed to explain what he
thought and language must be like if they are to represent reality, his
analyses yielded a criterion of intelligibility that proclaimed metaphysics
impossible. For Wittgenstein, arriving at this result required explaining