Philosophy of Language
- A.J. Ayer — Language, Truth and Logic
- Ordinary Language Philosophy
- Ethics Since Logical Positivism
- Philosophy of Language
A.J. Ayer — Language, Truth and Logic
1. The Elimination of Metaphysics
Without metaphysics the function of philosophy is changed. The nature of philosophical analysis is going to be such that it’s telling us about reality beyond experience. The a-priori does not tell us about reality, it’s simply tautological. And truth and probability can be taken as a phenomenalist rather than realist sense. Ethics does not tell us about objective moral order in reality, nor does theology tell us about the metaphysical entity known as God. So the elimination of metaphysics is the thesis run through the book.
But here we are several decades later on, metaphysics seems to be alive and well, what happened? One is because the critique of the verifiability criterion of meaning, on the basis of which metaphysics was declared to be meaningless. The second reason is that people began to rethink what is the essential nature of metaphysics. For Whitehead, philosophy is not about transcendent reality, but is about reality encountered in science and common sense. So in effect, Whitehead thinks that metaphysics is the speculative system that grows out of and incorporates proper scientific concept and concrete experience. But that’s not the only conception of metaphysics. Another view is that metaphysics is an attempt to work with a coordinating analogy drawn from ordinary experience. Similarly another book called “World of Hypothesis” which talks about root metaphors which unify everything. What you have then is a conceptual scheme. There is a third conception of metaphysics which grew out of the ordinary language movement that we’ll be exploring as conceptual network(“Prospect for Metaphysics”). In all these approaches, the emphasis is on a conceptual scheme, rather than a deductive system of a foundationalist sort. You’ll find that Ayer repudiates that sort of deductive system in metaphysics and the notion of reality that transcends the science and common sense deals with.
2. The Function of Philosophy
Among the superstitions from which we are freed by the abandonment of metaphysics is the view that the business of a philosopher is to construct a deductive system. In rejecting this we are not suggesting that philosophers can dispense with deductive reasoning but contesting the right to posit first principles and then offer them as the complete consequences of reality.
The function of philosophy is critical, the criticism of arguments and analysis of concepts etc. It’s the speculative function that’s been discarded by the logical positivists, leaving only the critical function.
The propositions of philosophy is not factual but linguistic in character, that is they don’t describe the behavior of physical or mental objects but they express definitions and the logical consequences of definitions.
He’s going to tell us that there are no factual philosophical propositions. Remember his delineation of two kinds of propositions, the synthetic and analytic. The synthetic are factual and the analytic formal.
The Nature of Philosophical Analysis
Philosophy is not concerned with explicit definitions, but the definition in use, we define a symbol in use not by saying it’s synonymous with another symbol, but by showing the sentences in which it significantly occurs is meaningfully used can be translated into equivalent sentences which contain neither the thing that is to be defined nor the synonyms. The only philosophical significant thing is the question whether sense datum statements are equivalent to material object statements, or is there some left over in the material object statement that is not reducible to sense statements.
You’ll find that one of the debates grows out of the positivist approach is whether the reduction of the material object to sense statements can ever be complete. Ayer is not so sure, there seem to be some untranslatable ingredient in the language of material objects. So he comes out as a phenomenalist.
The A-priori
Ayer is rejecting Mill’s theory of a-priori, which is propositions of logic and mathematics have the same status as empirical hypothesis. To that he maintained that there are inner, independent of experience, we may come to discover them through inductive process, but once we’ve apprehended them we see that they are necessarily true. The truth of logic and math is to examine cases, these truth are necessary because we never allow them to be anything else, we can’t abandon them without contradicting ourselves. If a proposition is analytic, when its validity solely depends on the symbols it contains and synthetic when its validity is determined by the facts of experience. So philosophy is concerned with definitions and what followed from definitions. And as a result philosophy is treated as simply an application of logic to language.
Truth & Probability
One main thing is that question what is truth. The problem of truth is really a problem of definition in use. When I say a proposition is true, all I’m doing is asserting the proposition. The assertion of truth is not itself a cognitive statement, it is rather a performative utterance. A performative utterance is one that perform another function. However, Austin disagrees with this and instead is asserting a correspondence definition of truth.
Ethics & Theology
Ethics
He talks about logical equivalent of ethical judgment and for that matter aesthetic judgment as well. In order to do that he distinguishes four kinds ethical utterances. First, definitions of ethical terms, which are analytic. Second, propositions describing the phenomenon of moral experience, which are psychological or social descriptions. Third, exaltations to moral virtue, it’s an exaltation, an encouragement. Fourth, actual ethical judgments. The utilitarian defines a moral term in a non-moral way, to sociological and psychological things that can be observed. So utilitarianism does not make sense of moral judgment. He agrees with G.E. Moore in rejecting the naturalistic fallacy, defining the good in terms of any natural kind of property. But in as much as any other definition, it’s a matter of convention. In other words, it’s an emotivism, an expression of emotion. Subjectivism defines the good in terms of some subjective feeling which people have, really what the subjectivist is doing is translating moral statements into psychological statements. But the emotivist is not translating moral statements at all because there is no statement to translate. He’s saying moral judgment like X is right, X is good is not a judgment, there is no factually meaningful predicate. Consequently all you have is an emotive expression, an exclamation. In this development of emotivism, he’s rejecting any empirical translation, any intrinsic intuitive conception of right, like Kant seem to assert. He’s saying there is no such thing as moral judgment.
Theology
In view of the verifiability criterion for meaning, the proposition that God exists is not factually meaning, because it is not empirically verifiable, directly or in principle. God is not a sense object. In fact God is a metaphysical term, meaningless because it has no empirical reference, there is no factual meaning to any talk about God. So all theological language is devoid of factual meaning. The consequence is that theism, atheism and agnosticism are all equally meaningless, they don’t assert anything, that is to say anything that is factually meaningful. The consequence is that there is no logical conflict really between religion and science. Because science asserts things but religion doesn’t. And the outcome is religious experience can provide no evidence because it is talking about psychological states, which can be empirically described, but does not give us empirical reference to God. And he talks about mystic in classic ways of talking about God as inscrutable indescribable, we can only speak of God by way of negation.
It was sort of reiterated in 1944 in an article by John Wisdom named “Gods”, in which he said that discussion of Gods is more dealing with people’s feelings than facts. It was that article that triggered a discussion that become quite famous. It was originally on BBC, the topic is theology and falsification. There are three people involved. One was Antony Flew who, in order to make sense of the way in which a believer talks of God to a skeptic, told a parable of an invisible gardener. That is to say some explorers come across an area where is a piece of land surrounded by a wall or fence and is plainly being cared for, it’s been cultivated, weeded, guarded, so want to see who is doing this. And they can’t find anybody. So they start talking themselves about an invisible gardener. This is the explanation they come up with. In terms of verifiability, falsifiability, what are you going to say? It is not possible to falsify with existence of an invisible gardener with empirical data. So it is the way in which believers talk about God’s care and God’s love so that everything that’s involved in the providence and grace and God’s activity could be encompassed in this sort of a story. It’s empirically verifiable but the explorers finding it very meaningful discussion. The second participant was R.M. Hare, and he comes closer to Wisdom’s emphasis on religious discussion as simply expression of feeling, perhaps existential feeling. In his story, there is an Oxford professor has certain kind of “blik”, which is an irrational kind of hang-up, a feeling he has, that somebody is trying to murder him. It explains the way in which he behaves. The invisible gardener was sort of detached observers, but the Oxford professor is very much involved, he cares. Of course what he’s saying is not empirically verifiable or falsifiable assertion, so it is subject to the criticism of the logical positivist and yet that doesn’t dissuade him. The third individual Basil Mitchell was himself a theologian at Oxford, he told another story of a stranger. And he’s talking about occupied France, …, tell someone what they’re doing and that they get their directions, and that they have military supplies with their underground activities and they explain they are doing this because a stranger had come, who had told them to fight against the evil occupiers that he would provide them with means and that he would come again to achieve complete victory and because they believed the stranger, this is the way they behave. Obviously the theologian is talking about the Christ who came and the second Advent that is promised that will achieve the complete victory. But the impression created by the strangers’ words, promises, deeds and personality are such they are completely convinced. So even though their account for the stranger is not amenable to empirical verification or falsification, it certainly explains their behavior. What you have then in these three cases is a story that is told to explain beliefs and behaviors of religious people. A story is not empirically verifiable, but the point is, in all three of these accounts, that there is a much looser use of purportedly factual language. In all three cases there is factual statement that has been made that is not capable of passing the logical positivists criteria and this discussion was widely accepted as the stimulus to the ongoing debate. It was representative of the ordinary language view that the positivist criterion is too reductionist, too narrow, there are much broader uses of language, even factual language than the positivist is able to account for.
Cambridge professor Braithwaite maintains that religious language is that religious language is about our moral commitments. What he’s really doing is committing himself to a certain way of life, not to the truth of the propositions on which the way of life traditionally has been grounded, but simply committing himself to a certain way of life. Taking a Kantian view of religion as being a symbolic expression of moral obligations.
Alasdair MacIntyre tries to maintain that religious language is itself a distinctive language game. It cannot be reduced to moral language or metaphysical language. He called it idiosyncratic. You might be quick to realize that he was coming at that juncture with a Barthian kind of theology, in which natural theology in any kind of rational evidence for the existence of God simply wasn’t Kosher.
Paul van Buren published a book called The Secular Meaning of the Gospel which launched the death of God theology. His point was that in a secular scientific age, we have to make new sense out of religious language, God language in its traditional supernaturalistic sense is a dead language, that has no meaning in a secular scientific age. Why not? Because anything that has factual meaning is amenable to empirical verification. So on the basis of verifiability principle, he was saying that God is dead. What he meant by that is that God language of a traditional sort is a dead language, it has no meaning. And the kind of meaning therefore that we make of the gospel is essentially that of some sort of secular humanism.
[William Alston]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alston, one of the leading voices in philosophy of religion is arguing for the existence of God using religious experiences.
A whole variety of alternatives were explored. And by the time you get to the late 50s, logical positivism seems to be declining and philosophy of religion is coming back in as completely Kosher.
The renewed surge in philosophy of religion began in the late 50s and early 60s and now has reached its largest crescendo since then with work not only in philosophy of religion but in philosophical theology and nobody thinks it’s meaningless because it’s not empirically verifiable. And that introduces us to the larger diversity of uses that language can have.
Ordinary Language Philosophy
Introduction
The rise of ordinary language is distinct from ideal language philosophy. The ideal for Russell and some positivist was to couch our knowledge in language that is free from all loose connotations because the symbols that are defined with reference to explicit empirical points and to show the interrelationship in terms of formal logical inferences. That led into the logical positivism movement. And the the ordinary movement, the later Wittgenstein and others reacted against that the ideal language is far too reductionist. The fact is language in its ordinary use performs many different tasks, not just the analytic and descriptive of empirical data task. So the appeal is to the much greater variety of language uses.
The Later Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein sees language as a social behavior, that is to say language is not tied to two functions, cognitive and emotive, the way the positivist have said, but it rather is a social phenomenon, that is used in all sorts of different ways. There are various forms that human life takes, language is used as a tool in whatever life form one is involved in, and therefore the diversity of language games.
One example which he uses that might help. He has a little book called “On Certainty”, and the topic is epistemology. He is taking on the demand for certainty, he’s a post modern criticizing enlightenment epistemology. He starts by referring to G.E. Moore’s famous lecture before the British Academy in which he was going to prove that two material objects exists. I know that my hand exists. “I know” is my personal assurance. But in addition, the claim that “I know” is claiming that a whole picture of the world is basically correct. It’s a much larger coherent world view in which there are certain basic beliefs as he calls them. So he has a common sense realism but is argued for from the verbal behaviors.
Gilbert Ryle
Two book of his that are referred to, one is called “Dilemmas” and the other “The Concept of Mind”. Dilemmas is about philosophical problems, realism vs idealism, freedom vs determinism, mind vs body, science and religion, which is right. His point is that they are false dilemmas, they are disputes over the territory that language covers. They represent what he calls category mistakes, where one word is used in two different categories so that you’re equivocating and there’s no real disputes. Do we perceive material objects or only sense data, well it depends on you’re using the language of neurophysiology or ordinary experience. If you’re talking of perception in terms of ordinary experience, there the language is such that you see material objects, if you’re talking of sense perception in terms of neurophysiology, there are the language that you see sense data. What about freedom and determinism? If you talk of human behaviors in terms of causal conditions that’s what the determinist does, but if you talk of the same behaviors in terms of responsibility, that’s what the indeterminist does. He also comes up with a version of the mind-body problem known as linguistic behaviorism. Mind language is simply language about private behaviors. Not metaphysical language, but mental Language is about actual or intended or possible bodily behaviors.
It was his book “The Concept of Mind” which started a debate going on the philosophy of mind which has been going on from the 1950s to the present day. We have two approaches to philosophy of mind recently. One is philosophy of mind in terms of psychological states, emotions, inner dispositions. One the other hand, a different method, on the metaphysical side of philosophy of mind is developed as well in the development of post positivist metaphysics.
J.L. Austin
His book “How to do things with words”, published in 1955, tries to systematize different types of language usage. In other words he thinks that in all this multitude of uses that Wittgenstein has introduced, there may be certain major types of utterance. He distinguishes cognitive utterance in the sense of assertions and propositions from performative utterances of more varied sort.
The other thing about J.L. Austin that you’ll be interested in is his book Sense and Sensibilia. This book is an attack on the sense data theory of A.J. Ayer, not the A.J. Ayer of his book “Language, Truth and Logic”, but of his book “The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge”. Ayer developed the phenomenalist view that all we know is sense data, Austin argued that this is due to his obsession with a few words and an oversimplification of their uses, words which denote sense data. The fact is our ordinary words are much subtler in their uses and make many more distinctions than philosophers have realized and the effects of perception is discovered by psychologists but also as noted by common mortals a much more diverse and complicated than is been allowed for. So I’m not going to maintain that we ought to be realist to embrace the doctrine that we do perceive material objects. The important point is two terms, sense data and material things live by talking each other’s washing. What we have to do is to rid ourselves of certain illusions, argued by those like Berkeley, Hume Russell and Ayer.
What you get is a loosening up of the whole positivist approach, a breakdown of that scientistic reductionism, a rejection of the verifiability theory. And that leads to reintroduction not only for religious language but metaphysical, ethical language, etc.
Ethics Since Logical Positivism
What we’ll see initially on ethics is the same sort of influence of ordinary language analysis in breaking that strangle hold of logical positivism with its emotivist theory of ethics. Ayer articulates it clearly in his chapter of ethics and theology when he argues that there are no moral judgments that can be made, only emotive expression, not even statements about subjective states of affairs, they’re simply descriptions of psychological states.
The influence of the ordinary language analysis comes out in a debate within what we call meta ethics. Meta ethics has to do with the meaning of ethical language, and you can see obviously how meta ethical concerns were the prime concern as a result of logical positivism claim that moral terminology is cognitively meaningless. But intuitionism didn’t die as a result of that, W.D. Ross continued a kind of intuitionism saying that what is intuitive is the right, not good. Mill and any consequentialist or teleological ethic is concerned with good, the good outcome, the good end, whereas the right has to do with the quality of an act or motive itself. W.D. Ross maintained that we have an intuitive recognition of right, the meaning of that term is clear even if we can’t reduce it to any other problem. It’s recognizable in the case of having entered into a contract or made a promise we then recognize that we have trailing obligations and it is right that we fulfill our obligations. The meaning of the term is commonly recognized obligations arising from certain relationships and contracts. You might notice a kind of contractarian theme and later on we’ll find it gets universalized as the basis of all moral obligations. But it’s simply a point of reference for Ross in giving examples of our intuitive recognition of the right.
There is a long tradition to trace our moral obligations to the will of God, and that was picked up of the meaning of ethical terms. Divine command theory can be used in a three different ways, one is in talking about the basis for moral obligation. Second is in terms of the source of moral knowledge. Third is in terms of meaning of moral terms. What does it mean to say it’s good or bad is to reference to God’s commands.
The outcome of that debate of moral language and its meaning reintroduced normative ethics and we’ve had last 20 years of thoroughly vigorous activity in normative ethics. I’ve listed 5 of the most influential writers.
John Rowls at Harvard, his book on the theory of justice introducing a contractarian approach. Recall John Locke’s notion of state of nature which led to a civil society depended on some social contract. What Rowls is doing is not just talk about a contractarian basis for government, but a contractarian basis for all morality. So he needs to have his equivalent of state of nature and what he describes is what would go on behind what he calls a veil of ignorance. If a group of people were to adopt a stance that they know nothing about future outcomes which might affect them for better or for worse, what sort of principles would you then setup over the ordering of our lives behind that veil of ignorance. He suggests that what would emerge are one that the benefits and costs of the society should be equitably distributed and second when there is in equity with advantage to the least advantageous people. It’s not quite a utilitarian approach. There’s a Kantian note on it, the emphasis on equality, ignoring other considerations, but it’s not Kantian ethic. It’s a contractarian arrangement. Morality does not rest on some divine commands, it does not rest on some a-priori moral principle, it does not rest on empirical assessment on some consequences. It rest rather on social agreement.
Also at Harvard Robert Nozick, anarchie the state of Utopia is about as conservative in economic and political thought as one could be. Nozick’s point is that there is just one basic principle, each and every individual has the right to acquire whatever you can as long as he doesn’t take it illegally from somebody else. Acquisition rights, it’s a form of ethical egoism, the one basic moral principle is respect for acquisition rights.
Alan Gewirth, University of Chicago, the Reason and Morality, essentially a Kantian, and in many ways he’s a representative of a rebirth of Kantian approach to ethics. Frequently called respect for persons. Alan Gewirth trys to spell that out in terms of the fact that I and each one of us want to have the maximum freedom possible to pursue our own life project. Now that fact that I want freedom if I’m going to be logically self consistent instead of logically self contradictory means that I should respect other people’s freedom to the same end. You don’t want to assert your own ends in violation of the same rights in others.
Alan Donegan’s book “The Theory of Morality” is also Kantian, what he tries to do is to pick up on the principle of respect for persons and see what could be inferred from that in terms of the implementation of a more specifically developed kind of ethic. He argues that the essential principles of Judeo-Christian ethic is true. He came to the conclusion that if the judeo-Chrisitan ethic was true then the underlying theology probably was too and he ought to be a Christian and being an ethical person he did.
Alastair Maclntyre, three works in this field and represent a turn from rule governed approaches to moral decisions and actions. Turing from that rather we call virtue ethics, an emphasis on moral character, the moral quality of the person rather than the moral quality of individual actions. He really traced a whole history of ethics from pre-socratic times, in fact from Homeric times to post Kantian times, making the point that the early Greeks and on into the Medievals were all interested primarily in the cultivation of virtue, concern for the growth, the development of the soul. And it’s not until the 18th century that you find, in the Enlightenment, the development of a rule-based ethic of decisions and actions taking precedence. What Maclntyre does is not only to trace the development of these two traditions in ethics, look what came after virtue in a rule governed ethic, look at the development of utilitarianism and its complete indifference to the matters of virtue, and simply interested in maximum utility of actions and policies. It’s after non-moral aims, rather than the moral end of character development. But he also makes the point that these rest on different philosophical traditions, that are incommensurable. You cannot translate one into terms of the other. And he pursues this in his second volumes: “Whose Justice, Which Rationality”. Whose question makes plain the incommensurability of the traditions as far as the meaning and demands of justice are concerned but Which Rationality lays emphasis on the incommensurability of the reasons that are given for the moral points of view that are offered. There are different standard of rational judgment, that are involved and that theme comes out once again in his third volume: “Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry”.
At this junction, Rowl’s in rule governed, principle governed ethical decisions and Maclntyre in virtue ethics are the most discussed individual writers.
Philosophy of Language
More recent development of language involved developments in metaphysics and ontology. That shouldn’t be a surprise when we recognize the categories of thought for Aristotle, for Hegel. In that sense the logical categories evident in language will be related to ontology. Particularly when we talk about the demise of logical positivism and the way in which its reductionist view of language eliminated metaphysics, it’s understandable that new views of language would open up to metaphysics. I want to divide topics in metaphysics dealing with ontology into three topics.
Logical Entities
The first is logical entities, in addition to physical entities and mental states. We have to go back to Frege, who distinguishes between sense and reference. That is to say you can have a sentence which have both sense and reference. Sense of a sentence has to do with its logical meaning, a proposition, an objective logical state of affairs. And that logical state of affairs can have reference to things like sense data, material objects etc. Sometimes we distinguish them by talking about sense as the intentional meaning and reference as extensional meaning.
Karl Popper distinguishes not just these two worlds of sense and reference, but a third world, that is to say, in addition to physical objects that that a sentence can refer, there are two things involved in the intentional level, mental state and the logical object of that mental state.
This notion of logical objects is going to be challenged by anybody with a strongly empiricist bent. That is precisely the case with W.V.O Quine who challenged in his essay “Logic without Ontology”, his view is that language does not need that intentional object, does not need essences, does not need universals, all that language needs are simply predicates and qualifiers. And he’s quick to point out that we can have statements in logical terms using the symbolism of ideal language. You can play with qualifiers in formal logic and terms that have empirical reference. What Quine is trying to say that meanings are function of language, not of mental states, the question when something is uttered is not what you are thinking of, but what you are referring to, what you are talking about. He takes language to be verbal behavior, a kind of overt physical behavior, he’s only interested in thought in so far as it is expressed in the symbolism of language, thought is not psychological activity, it is verbal behavior. So universal terms like roundness, humanness are not names for essences, but are simply terms that refer to any member of the whole set of similar particulars. He’s a nominalist. A set of similar things is merely a classification we make with our language, it is the language that classifies similar things, so we organize our worlds by means of the language we use. The categories of things do not have real essences in common logical objects, they are simply empirical similarities in that syncategorematic terminology.
Nicholas Wolterstorff got into that debate with a book called “On Universals”, what he does is to speak of universals as possibles, unchanging logical possibilities that are objectively real in the sense that they cannot be something other than they are. In addition to actual entities of a physical sort, perhaps of any material sort as well, this world and any possible world is such that there are only certain kind of things that are logically possible. He’s trying to introduce the discussion of universals as a realm of possibles. That there are objective logical possibilities so that not everything is possible but certain ranges of things are possible and only some of which have been actualized in this world. Wolterstorff is saying that particulars are the actual entities, the independently existing real things in that sense, universals are not objective entities of some sort as with Plato, but they are objective logical possibilities. And actual entities instantiates some of these possibilities. He’s arguing that there are logical possibilities, this realm of possibles, that in this realm are logical entities, rather than physical entities. One use his making of this is his aesthetic theory and another is his doctrine of creation.
Realism/Anti-Realism
Second issue that comes up in connection with philosophy of language is realism v.s. anti-realism, that we had reference to in epistemology. And the starting point here is the work of French linguistic structuralist. You get structuralism in anthropology, psychology and linguistics. Some psychologist see certain preset stages in cognitive development through which the human mind goes in the gradual process of growth and maturation. There is pre-established structure to cognitive development. If you look at Chomsky, he has structuralism in linguistics.
Saussure
Saussure similarly about language, but has a peculiar twist that had a great deal of impact, according to Saussure language consists of arbitrarily assigned words that are signs that refer to empirical objects, these arbitrarily assigned terms are inter-related to each other, the point is you get a variety of different languages not because of the differences of words but relationships between words. We structure our own languages and so we structure our own worlds of experience and give them the meaning that we think they have. So by structuring the language of science the way the positivist did they constructed a world of positivist experience. They provided as it were the linguistic spectacles through which positivists could see this world and only see it that way. There are no fixed meanings, universal conceptions or logical entities. There are only the particulars of sense experience, organized in different ways, by means of the language that we employ. You can see that Neo-Kantian strain. It’s not Kant in the sense of conceptual grid, but in the sense of a linguist grid, a language structure grid which impose a-priori on actual sensibility with the result that the way on one language sees the world is going to be different from another. There is a relativity of different constructions and none of them can be taken as identical with the real world. Our languages structure world of experience and we do not know reality in itself. Anti-realism is the result. In Europe it’s from that sort of background that Derrida, the deconstructionist comes. Deconstruction is undoing what structuralist says with abstraction, trying to deconstruct the verbal schemes to show that it doesn’t really work. It is our language that dominates the world of experience and keeps us from seeing it and talking about it in other ways than we might. The difference with Chomsky is that he thinks there is a universal, depth structure shared by all languages in addition to this surface structure which Saussure is talking about.
Nelson Goodman
That sort of variability is picked up by analytic tradition by Nelson Goodman, who is a nominalist in the Quine tradition. He’s structuring worlds of experience to philosophy of science so that science is simply dealing with language constructs, a scientific theory is just a language. As Mark says science is just an economical way describing sense data. So there can be alternative scientific theories, and these alternative scientific languages are not inter-translatable, or in technical term, they are incommensurable, yet they are equally sound, equally viable. Our theories and general concepts in science are symbols, not descriptions, they are symbols like artistic symbols and Nelson Goodman has written in aesthetic theory, where he sees a work of art as creative language structuring certain things, science similarly. The outcome is that he becomes relativist and phenomenalist. There’s really no such thing as true theory, you can accept several pictures as being correct, you can link the dots in different ways. A correct scientific picture is one that covers scope of data, it has adequate scope, it’s coherent, it’s logically consistent and it hangs together in a unified fashion, it enables enables you to talk data in simple rather than unnecessary complicated ways, principle of parsimony and you can infer things from it that they are fruitful for further hypothesis and experimentation. The person who in philosophy of science has taken it to the relativist extreme is Feyeraband, who is much less given to talk about correct picture or pictures and is blunt about relativity of all scientific knowledge and this anti-realism in philosophy of science is one of the things that feeds into the post-modernism of Richard Rorty in his “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, the mirror is the subjective ideas in the mind that John Locke talks about, and he’s insisting on the failure on that representational theory of knowledge and the foundationalism with which it was associated, the relativity of the structures of ideas or complex concepts, scientific theories. So he sees philosophy not as giving us access to the truth at all about things in themselves, but simply a conversation that has pragmatic value but there is no translatability of various languages and structures.
Hilary Putnam
In contrast to Nelson Goodman is the work of Hilary Putnam at Harvard, who is quick to grant the alternative constructs certainly possible and that scientific theories subject to revision. In other words he’s rejecting foundationalism but he still wants scientific theories to be taken realistically and he insists that our constructs are not just conventional ways of talking. He justifies it by saying that we have firm knowledge of certain observations and material entities and within those he include things like electrons, force fields and spacial magnitudes. So the theoretical structure we built may be tentative, they are intended to be statements about reality. Putnam want science to be taken realistically in a provisional way. Within these known points of reference that he talks about are not only electrons, force fields but also certain natural kinds. There are classifications that are objective. There are objective kind, species and general laws that we recognize whatever the language. There are logical objects, objects of thought, not just particular data. So Putnam is a realist about science and certain classifications, general principles.
Possible Worlds
There are two considerations about possible worlds that we have run into. One is that there are alternative ways that we, with our language, construct our experience. So that there might be possible worlds in the sense of worlds that we structure. The second, the sort of things that comes up with the theory of logical entities which admits that not all logical possibilities are actualized in this space time world and there are many other logically possible worlds than this one. And in that sense, among the logical objects of thought are other possible worlds.
Nelson Goodman
Nelson Goodman is the first one to pick up here. He want logic without ontology, and he does not want logical entities. He sees us as structuring our own worlds, so for Goodman, the language of possible worlds is merely a verbal device, it’s a semantical trick. All possible worlds are simply linguistic constructs where the particular points of reference are things we all experience or might possibly have experienced. So in that sense another possible world is simply a hypothetical world, it’s a hypothesis about what this world might have been, so the language of possible world is just the language of empirical hypothesis and nothing more. He is therefore an anti-realist when it comes to possible worlds.
D.K. Lewis
On the other hand you get the English philosopher DK Lewis who is not convinced that the language of other possible worlds is reducible to hypothetical statements about this actual world, or counterfactual statements. A lot of attention has been given then by recent language philosophy and logic to the logic of counterfactuals. Can counterfactual statements be adequately explained as simply hypothetical statements about this actual world, explained simply as empirical hypotheses that will not be confirmed as empirically correct? Or if they’re not reducible to hypotheticals then it would seem that we have to admit that there are logical entities of an objective sort that we are talking about when we talk about logical possibilities that haven’t been actualized. The argument is of course that counterfactual statements cannot be reduced without remainder into hypotheticals. And if they cannot then you have to be a realist about possible worlds. But to be a realist about possible worlds you have to be a realist about logical entities.
That kind of debate has all sorts of fascinating implications. Alvin Plantinga in his book “Nature of Necessity” worked with this sort of issue and argued that there is a logically possible world in which God necessarily exists. So this is the this is the direction that philosophy of language is given and you can see how it’s opened up virtually all of the traditional metaphysical questions. So that as we are today not only philosophy of religion and ethics are alive and well and so is metaphysics.