Kit Fine, Peter van Inwagen, David Armstrong and many others: work that has, to cite just one example, made it anachronistic to dismiss essentialism as anachronistic.6 On the traditional grand narrative schemes in the history of philosophy, this activity must be a throwback to pre-Kantian metaphysics: it ought not to be happening – but it is. Many of those who practice it happily acknowledge its continuity with traditional metaphysics; appeals to the authority of Kant, or Wittgenstein, or history, ring hollow, for they are unbacked by any argument that has withstood the test of recent time.
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.
Might the contrast between the new-old metaphysics and the conceptual turn be less stark than it appears to be? Contemporary metaphysicians fi rmly resist attempts to reconstrue their enterprise as the analysis of thought – unlike Sir Peter Strawson, who defi ned his “descriptive metaphysics” as “content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world” (1959: 9). But can one reflect on concepts without reflecting on reality itself? For the aboutness of thought and talk is their very point. This idea has been emphasized by David Wiggins, Dummett’s successor and my predecessor in the Wykeham Chair, and author of some of the most distinguished essentialist metaphysics, in which considerations of logic and biology harmoniously combine. Wiggins (2001: 12) writes: “Let us forget once and for all the very idea of some knowledge of language or meaning that is not knowledge of the world itself.”
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.
Dummett claimed not that the traditional questions of metaphysics cannot be answered but that the way to answer them is by the analysis of thought and language. For example, in order to determine whether there are numbers, one must determine whether number words such as “7” function semantically like proper names in the context of sentences uttered in mathematical discourse. But what is it so to function? Although devil words such as “Satan” appear to function semantically like proper names in the context of sentences uttered in devil-worshipping discourse, one should not jump to the conclusion that there are devils. However enthusiastically devilworshippers use “Satan” as though it referred to something, that does not make it refer to something. Although empty names appear to function semantically like referring names in the context of sentences uttered by those who believe the names to refer, the appearances are deceptive. “Satan” refers to something if and only if some sentence with “Satan” in subject position (such as “Satan is self-identical”) expresses a truth, but the analysis of thought and language is not the best way to discover whether any such sentence does indeed express a truth. Of course, what goes for “Satan” may not go for “7.” According to some neo-logicists, “7 exists” is an analytic truth (what Ayer might have called a formal consequence of defi nitions), which “Satan exists” does not even purport to be. Such a claim needs the backing of an appropriate theory of analyticity.
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.
Historians of philosophy on the grand scale may be too Whiggish or Hegelian to regard the linguistic or conceptual turn as merely a false turning from which philosophy is withdrawing now that it recognizes its mistake. We are supposed to go forward from it, not back. At the very least, we should learn from our mistakes, if only not to repeat them. But if the conceptual turn was a mistake, it was not a simple blunder; it went too deep for that. A new narrative structure is needed for the history of philosophy since 1960; it is clear only in the roughest outline what it should be.
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 there are no Enigmas, it may well be a waste of time to worry whether there are Enigmas. But it would not follow that it is a waste of time to worry
