Based Academia, Part 2: The Assumptions of Analytic Philosophers

The prejudices of analytic philosophy constitute a narrow Overton window.

A narrow window

I wrote yesterday about wanting to arrive at a based philosophy of language within analytic philosophy. Yet I implied that much of existing analytic philosophy of language is not based - how so?

First, a brief explanation of analytic philosophy, for those not in the know: A sociological divide arose in the mid-twentieth century between at least two different kinds of philosophy and kinds of philosophy departments. Though two of its founders were German, Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy dominated the British academy and, from there, the American academy. Its concerns focused on logical, quasi-mathematical analysis of language as a way of either answering or bypassing the traditional questions of philosophy.

“Continental philosophy” is, perhaps, the moniker analytics use to describe all that is non-analytic, though it makes geographical reference to the dominance on the European continent of a different style of philosophy. Following on the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, this approach retained a focus on traditional questions of philosophy and with an existential emphasis. However, it did so without the same faith in a method, in achieving clarity through rigor. 

Today, philosophy departments are quite well-sorted as either analytic or continental. The forms of philosophy are so different that an expert in one can be quite ignorant of the other. The best shorthand I have ever heard for the difference between them is the following quip: “Analytic philosophers provide lucid answers to inane questions, while continental philosophers address deep questions with incomprehensible answers.” Let’s just say that neither of those are viable culminations of 2,500 years of philosophizing.

Returning to analytic philosophy in particular, the method its founders proposed for dealing rigorously with the questions of philosophy was the analysis of language. Today, that is expressed in a sort of linguistic obsession of philosophers and also a set of unnoticed assumptions about the relationship between philosophy and language. I long chafed under these prejudices; it has been the work of recent months for me to uncover and articulate them.

One of these assumptions is that of “ontological commitment”: The use of a noun makes one ontologically committed to the existence of an entity of that type. When combined with scientistic or materialist prejudice, analytic philosophy becomes a sort of game: The goal is minimal ontological commitment. The method is reduction of certain entities to other entities and of certain turns of phrase to other turns of phrase. The catch is that analytic philosophers are convinced that the most “respectable” of disciplines, mathematics and physics, commit us already to a great many non-material entities, and that psychology is in danger of committing us to some even less respectable entities, such as mental states, beliefs, desires, and so on. In short, the game of analytic philosophy is materialism, but rigged, by the materialists, against themselves.

As one may detect, the philosophy of language is not simply a philosophical method, any outcome of which the analytic philosopher will accept. Most analytic philosophers are motivated also by the pursuit of a scientifically “respectable” worldview. The goal would be only ever to use forms of speech that scientists would use in their scientific activities, and to be committed to only those entities to which our best scientific theories commit us. Yet, unlike the less reflective village atheists, the analytic philosophers’ method does, in many cases, hamstring them and force them to reckon with the non-materialistic “ontological commitments” of certain of the sciences and of ordinary human language itself.

As a result, the “ontology” of a great many analytic philosophers includes not only those material entities that are the ordinary referents of the word “object,” as G. E. Moore put it (another founder of analytic philosophy), “middle-sized dry goods,” but also such as facts, states of affairs, propositions, properties, meanings of words, and so on. While many of us use such nouns without a guilty conscience, the analytic philosopher detects in them all the guilt of ontological commitment. Failing to purify his language of these terms, the philosopher is committed to a rather plentiful ontology.

Another of the unspoken commitments of analytic philosophy is that the metaphysical structure of the world can be read directly off of grade-school grammar: The world is composed of objects and properties, and these can be read directly off the grammatical subjects and predicates of sentences. There is a funny type of double-speak here. On the one hand, philosophers talk about these as real entities, as real as “middle-sized dry goods”; this is a characteristically realist commitment. On the other hand, they confess that these can be multiplied and postulated by simple permutations of the words of a language into grammatical predicates, a characteristically nominalist move. What does this reveal? Analytic philosophy is nominalism masquerading as realism.

After all, the division of reality into objects and properties is not just the content of the obvious metaphysical structure of reality. It is an historically tendentious metaphysics derived from Gottlob Frege’s logical analysis of language. Frege argued that the meaning of a sentence was the thought (today, proposition) it expressed, and that these thoughts could be analyzed into their object (subject) and concept (predicate). In turn, the relation between object and concept could be understood on the model of a mathematical function. The object is the argument, or variable, as x, in f(x); the concept is the function, as f( ). Thus, language could receive a quasi-mathematical analysis, and the logical analysis of language could provide a logically- and linguistically-grounded metaphysics, replacing that of Aristotle.

One might think that the purpose of metaphysics would be to distinguish what is part of reality from what is mere words. (Aristotle made the distinction. Not every linguistic predicate counted as an accident of a substance. Not every noun counted as a substance.) Analytic philosophy ignores the distinction, multiplying so-called “Cambridge properties,” like being self-identical, being such that I am thinking about it, being non-identical with the number four. In short, whatever grammatical predicate one wants to formulate is read as reflecting an actual entity with real existence.

The final prejudice of analytic philosophy is that, if ideas can be written in symbols, acronyms, and abbreviations, and especially if they can come to resemble mathematical notation, then they become inherently clearer, even as fewer and fewer people can understand them. The clearest form of expression would be in a type of notation whose logic could be followed mechanically without comprehension of the meaning of the words. Of course, this reveals that analytic philosophy ultimately views philosophy as the handmaiden, not even of science, but of digital technology.

If ideas can be written in symbols, acronyms, and abbreviations, then they become inherently clearer, even as fewer and fewer people can understand them.

At this point, for most of us, the illusion breaks: The appearance of mathematical notation is nothing more than that, an appearance. Philosophy is not and never will become a sub-field of mathematics. Philosophy is the last bastion of the questions that cannot be answered by a mechanical method; when this is finally lost sight of, humanity is lost.

Philosophy that is beholden to so many prejudices, that seeks respectability rather than truth, that confuses mere words with reality, that deceives itself that it is realist when it is nominalist, such philosophy is the furthest thing from based. Its objects are ethereal; its concepts are empty; its thoughts are mere illusions of thought. The “science” to which it pledges commitment is the cult of scientism.

Analytic philosophy views philosophy as the handmaiden, not even of science, but of digital technology.

The original promise of analytic philosophy, that through the analysis of language, we should be cured of our metaphysical illusions, has been betrayed. The opposite has occurred. Through the analysis of language, metaphysical illusions have been created, and a whole profession is held captive.