From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!gatech!dscatl!gwinnett!depsych!rc Tue Nov 26 12:31:44 EST 1991
Article 1521 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Is English philosophy still "Anglo-American"?
Message-ID: <Zq1TBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 22 Nov 91 21:12:10 GMT
Lines: 55

I think the belief in America is that since the "revolt" against
"Hegel" which occurred in Edwardian England -- a strange and
amorphous "Hegel," who stood for "idealism" and some kind of
"Absolute" something or other, and largely unrelated to the real,
historical Hegel who may have said a few silly things but mainly
had some keen insights into human interpretive, dogmatic and
ideological thinking which had a lot of practical ramifications --
"Anglo-American" philosophy has been involved almost exclusively
in "logical analysis," which is based on the "formal semantics" of
Frege and Tarski (and therefore has as continental an origin as
phenomenology and existentialism).

But William Chesters writes:
>Why is everyone fixated with classical semantics?  What does Mikhail make of
>the later Wittgenstein's ideas about language (and maths): he went right off
>truth-conditional semantics as a theory of meaning. Which is not to say that
>he comes up with a replacement "theory" - some people seem to think he was dead
>set against the whole idea.  If anything, he thinks that assertibility
>conditions determine meaning; that language has to be seen as reactions to
>things rather than descriptions along the lines of logic.  He makes the point
>that you can't justify everything you say; if you tried, you would have an
>infinite regress of justifying your justificatory rules (Phil. Investigations,
>para. somewhere-in-the-late-200s - I'll dig it out if anyone is interesteD).
>I think John McDowell & Gareth Evans too have interesting ideas about the role
>of the "constitutive force" of conventions, assumptions and traditions in
>language (and life in general).  (Lots of this stuff is concerned with
>rebutting scepticism based essentially on a classical "objective"
>correspondence outlook).
>
>My personal opinion is that anything Mikhail would recognize as semantics :-)
>is going to be a bad theory of language, let alone thought in general.  I
>recall reading some stuff by Kripke (Locke Lectures at Oxford University in
>the late 70s) in which he gives various reasons why the Russellian treatment
>of, for example, definite descriptions, is not sufficient for real language:
>what does Mikhail think of Kripke?
>
>Um ... this looks a bit telegraphic but I must zoom off now ...

These references are certainly suggestive, but if the British wing
of Anglo-American philosophical thought is _not_ developing more
formal semantic systems, what _are_ they doing?

Logical analysis has such a commanding, even olympian, rhetorical
position, able to look down on "ordinary" theories and dismiss
them as a class with such phrases as "any theory which does such
and such" or "theories such as those which do this and that," that
confronting a critique stemming from that tradition is something
like listening to an oracular pronouncement.  If British
philosophers aren't doing _that_, what _are_ they doing?

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


