Analytic and Linguistic Philosophy

I

Introduction

Analytic and Linguistic Philosophy, philosophical movement, dominant in Britain and the United States since World War II, that aims to clarify language and analyse the concepts expressed in it. Versions of the movement have been given a variety of designations, including “linguistic analysis”, “logical empiricism”, “logical positivism”, “Cambridge analysis”, and “Oxford philosophy”. The last two labels are derived from the English universities where this philosophical method has been particularly influential. Although no specific doctrines or tenets are accepted by the movement as a whole, analytic and linguistic philosophers mostly agree that the proper activity of philosophy is clarifying language, or, as some prefer, clarifying concepts. The aim of this activity is to settle philosophical disputes and resolve philosophical problems, which, it is often argued, originate in linguistic confusion.

II

Approaches

A considerable diversity of views exists among analytic and linguistic philosophers regarding the nature of conceptual or linguistic analysis. Some are primarily concerned with clarifying the meaning of specific words or phrases as an essential step in making philosophical assertions clear and unambiguous. Others are more concerned with determining the general conditions that must be met for any linguistic utterance to be meaningful; their intent is to establish a criterion that will distinguish between meaningful and nonsensical sentences. Still other analysts are interested in creating formal, symbolic languages that are mathematical in nature. Their claim is that philosophical problems can be more effectively dealt with once they are formulated in a rigorous logical language.

By contrast, many philosophers associated with the movement have focused on the analysis of ordinary, or natural, language. Difficulties arise when concepts such as time and freedom, for example, are considered apart from the linguistic context in which they normally appear. Attention to language as it is ordinarily used is the key, it is argued, to resolving many philosophical puzzles.

III

Early History

Linguistic analysis as a method of philosophy is as old as the Greeks. Several of the dialogues of Plato, for example, are specifically concerned with clarifying terms and concepts. Nevertheless, this style of philosophizing received dramatically renewed emphasis in the 20th century. Influenced by the earlier British empirical tradition of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill and by the writings of the German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege, the 20th-century English philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell became the founders of this contemporary analytic and linguistic trend. As students together at the University of Cambridge, Moore and Russell rejected Hegelian Idealism, particularly as it was reflected in the work of the English metaphysician Francis Herbert Bradley, who held that nothing is completely real except the Absolute. In their opposition to idealism and in their commitment to the view that careful attention to language is crucial in philosophical inquiry, they set the mood and style of philosophizing for much of the 20th-century English-speaking world.

For Moore, philosophy was first and foremost analysis. The philosopher’s task involves clarifying puzzling propositions or concepts by indicating less puzzling propositions or concepts to which the originals are held to be logically equivalent. Once this task has been completed, the truth or falsity of problematic philosophical assertions can be determined more adequately. Moore was noted for his careful analyses of such puzzling philosophical claims as “time is unreal”, analyses that then helped him determine the truth of such assertions.

Russell, strongly influenced by the precision of mathematics, was concerned with developing an ideal logical language that would accurately reflect the nature of the world. Complex propositions, Russell maintained, can be resolved into their simplest components, which he called atomic propositions. These propositions refer to atomic facts, the ultimate constituents of the universe. The metaphysical view that the universe is composed of such atomic facts, and the insistence that meaningful propositions must correspond to these facts make up what Russell called logical atomism. His interest in the structure of language also led him to distinguish between the grammatical form of a proposition and its logical form. According to Russell, the statements “John is good” and “John is tall” have the same grammatical form but different logical forms. Failure to recognize this would lead one to treat the property “goodness” as if it were a characteristic of John in the same way that the property “tallness” is a characteristic of John. Such failure results in philosophical confusion.

IV

Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists

Russell’s work in mathematics attracted to Cambridge the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became a central figure in the analytic and linguistic movement. In his first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921; trans. 1922), in which he first presented his theory of language, Wittgenstein argued that “all philosophy is a ‘critique of language’” and that “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts”. The results of Wittgenstein’s analysis resembled Russell’s logical atomism. The world, he argued, is ultimately composed of simple facts, which it is the purpose of language to picture. To be meaningful, statements about the world must be reducible to linguistic utterances that have a structure similar to the simple facts pictured. In this early Wittgensteinian analysis, only propositions that picture facts—the propositions of science—are considered factually meaningful. Metaphysical, theological, and ethical sentences are judged to be factually meaningless.

Influenced by Russell, Wittgenstein, Ernst Mach, and others, a group of philosophers and mathematicians in Vienna in the 1920s initiated the movement known as logical positivism. Led by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, the Vienna Circle initiated one of the most important chapters in the history of analytic and linguistic philosophy. According to the positivists, the task of philosophy is the clarification of meaning, not the discovery of new facts (the job of science) or the construction of comprehensive accounts of reality (the misguided pursuit of traditional metaphysics).

The positivists divided all meaningful assertions into two classes: analytic propositions and empirically verifiable ones. Analytic propositions, which include the propositions of logic and mathematics, are statements the truth or falsity of which depend altogether on the meanings of the terms constituting the statement. An example would be the proposition “two plus two equals four”. The second class of meaningful propositions includes all statements about the world that can be verified, at least in principle, by sense experience. Indeed, the meaning of such propositions is identified with the empirical method of verification. This verifiability theory of meaning, the positivists concluded, would demonstrate that scientific statements are genuine factual claims and that metaphysical, religious, and ethical sentences are factually empty. The ideas of logical positivism were made popular in England by the publication of Language, Truth and Logic by A. J. Ayer in 1936. In the field of ethics, the logical positivists argued that although ethical statements had no factual content, they served to express the emotions of the speaker. This theory, known as the emotivist theory of ethics, had its roots in Hume’s philosophy.