What is "Analytic" Philosophy? Thoughts from Fodor

There's a splendid essay in the London Review of Books by my favorite contemporary Anglophone philosopher taking on some Kripkean orthodoxies, and striking another blow for naturalism. Here's the conclusion (but you should read the whole thing):

"It's past time to draw the moral, which I take to be that a plethora of claims to the contrary notwithstanding, you can't escape Quine's web just by opting for a metaphysical notion of necessity. Not, anyhow, if the latter is grounded in intuitions about what possible worlds there are. That's because some story is needed about what makes such intuitions true (or false) and, as far as I can see, the only candidates are facts about concepts. It's 'water' being a material kind concept that vindicates the intuition that water is necessarily H2O. Well, but if Quine is right and there aren't any such facts about concepts, then there is nothing to vindicate modal intuitions. Accordingly, if the methodology of analytic philosophy lacked a rationale pre-Kripke, it continues to do so."

I was curious about the passing references to "analytic philosophy" in Fodor's essay. As longtime readers know, I don't think anyone knows what "analytic philosophy" is, but if anyone does, it should be Jerry Fodor! So I e-mailed Jerry as follows:

"I enjoyed (as I always do) your most recent essay in LRB, but I have a question for you: namely, what in the world is 'analytic' philosophy these days? My sense is you're uncertain too, hence the modifier 'Anglophone' that you employ (i.e., it's the kind of philosophy, whatever it is, that most English-speaking philosophers do). But Frank Jackson thinks analyzing concepts is worthwhile, you and Quine don't. Are all of you analytic philosophers? You write clearly, and Christopher Peacocke and John McDowell do not. Are all of you analytic philosophers? (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer all write much better than those Dummett offspring.) There's plainly no substantive program, metaphysical or epistemological, shared by 'analytic' philosophers anymore. So what in the world is 'analytic' philosophy these days? I don't think anyone actually knows, but maybe I'm wrong. You'll tell me."

Fodor kindly replied, and gave me permission to post his interesting remarks:

"OK, fair enough; it's never really so that one size fits all. On the other hand, I do think that there are a couple of theses that major US and UK philosophers have more or less agreed about (mostly implicitly, to be sure) over the last fifty years or so, and that have largely shaped the landscape of philosophical discussions. Since I think both theses are wrong, I feel strongly about getting them out in the open where they can be jumped up and down on.

"The first is semantic pragmatism: the idea that intensional content is to be explicated as some sort of `know how' , hence in epistemic terms. The typical avatar of this view is the thesis that concept possession is something like knowing how to evaluate inferences whose validity turns on the concept, and/or knowing how to sort things that the concept applies to. Peacocke is perhaps the current paradigm, but it's hard to think of anyone since Wittgenstein (indeed, since Dewey) who doesn't hold it. In my view, it's entirely misguided. To have the concept C is to be able to think about Cs as such. Confusing epistemology with semantics has damned near ruined the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language for as long as I can remember. (I have gone on about this in an article called `Having concepts, a brief refutation of the 20th Century,' in a recent issue of MIND AND LANGUAGE. I expect I'll still be going on about it for the foreseeable future.

"The second is the methodological doctrine that philosophy does (or should) procede by the method of `semantic ascent'; that is by translating metaphysical questions (eg. how does perception work) into questions of conceptual analysis (`how do we use the word `see'; or `what is the concept of seeing'. The translation is supposed to underwrite the (putative) a priority of philosohical theses, and the (putative) fact that philosophy is a game that anyone can play (`you don't need to be a psychologist to understand how seeing works; we ALL have the concept SEE (and/or we ALL know how to use the world)). In fact, I doubt that typical interesting philosophical claims should (or even can) be treated as theses about the analysis of concepts. I am deeply moved by the reflection that no concept has ever been analyzed by any analytic philosopher, however hard analytic philosophers have tried. This does suggest that their methodological assumptions are due for reconsideration.

"To be sure, the scene isn't as clear as I've been making out. In the UK, you get these views in their pristine condition (Dummett is the parade case); in the US, they are often combined with a strong commitment to naturalism. Quine's a case; he's a self-anounced semantic pragmatist, so he really ought to believe in conceptual analysis. But he's a naturalist, so he's dubious about the a priori. The dialectical fix was to speak (not of analysis but) of canonical representation (representation in a canoncial notation) and then procede to do just the kind of philosophy that everybody else did. A similar story could be told about Davidson, but to hell with it.

"Who among the living counts as an analytic philosopher by these jaundiced criteria? Not me, for sure. But practically everybody in Australia; Peacocke (see above), McDowell, Brandom, Travis (when he isn't being simply a nihilist), everybody in cognitive science without exception. And so forth. You needn't aim; just pull the trigger and you'll hit one.

"Your question deserves a fuller answer than this; but that would be an article; or a book; or a lifetime; and I'm depressed enough already. To say nothing of too old."

I then wrote back to Fodor:

"Very interesting, thanks. So analytic philosophy is not a matter of style (clarity, a certain kind of argumentation), but two distinctive doctrines, one of which ('semantic ascent') keeps alive the analysis of concepts as the core philosophical activity. And on this view, it turns out that Jerry Fodor isn't an analytic philosopher to boot! Surely our friends in English Departments will think this a paradox worthy of the late Professor Derrida.

"I would have thought there were more dissenters from semantic pragmatism than you seem to allow--isn't the causal theory of content industry, for example, out of sync with semantic pragmatism?"

To which Fodor replied:

"Oh, well, there's an uninteresting notion of `analytic philosopher' which just means `philosopher who tries to argue for his claims.' I am, or at least hope some day to be, an analytic philosopher in THAT sense.

"BTW: causal theories of INTENSIONAL CONTENT are quite compatible with pragmatic theories of CONCEPT POSSESSION. Part of the confusion in analytical philosophy come from the (unargued) claim that a theory of concept possession just is a theory of intensional content and vice versa. (Dummett is pretty explicit about requiring this; it is, he says, part of what 'philosophers want' from a theory of meaning. Didn't somebody once say 'you can't always get what you want?')"

And in a PS, he added: "as far as I can recall, I don't have any friends in English Departments."

My parting observation: "Thanks for the clarification on semantic pragmatism and causal theories of content. Hegel, of course, not to mention Husserl and Habermas, are analytic philosophers, in the sense of 'philosopher who tries to argue for his claims.' Hegel and Heidegger (with some help from Brandom) are also semantic pragmatists. And so it goes..."

Comments are open. No anonymous posts.

Comments

[Gary Kemp]

I'm surprised Fodor attempts such specificity in analyzing 'analytic philosopher', but I don't think the word is gibberish, or merely rhetorical. I think of analytical philosophy in the first place as scientistic (I won't try to explain that) in a salutary sense, and not just as committed to argument but to argument that (1) self-consciously strives to employ inference-patterns accepted as valid and (2) self-consciously strives to use language that is either plain or can lucidly be explained, and often explicitly defined, in terms of plain language. For these reasons it is or strives to be continuous with science. So Fodor is an analytical philosopher, but NOT the later Wittgenstein. Early Husserl has a claim to it, which is fine with me, except that it now looks like a cul-de-sac, and hard to dovetail with science. Philosophers whose understanding demands a special act of mind, one not exercised in ordinary scientific understanding or common sense, are not analytical philosophers.

[Matt Davidson]

Like Frege, when we grasp senses?

[Brian Leiter]

I find it hard to see that McDowell--to take only the most obvious example--is an "analytic philosopher" in Professor Kemp's sense, but I welcome further comments on that subject. And what about Kant? Hume? Descartes? Are they now also analytic philosophers?

[Matt Davidson]

From the Fodor article

"The point for present purposes is that Kripke can be read as having provided the very notion of necessity that the vindication of analytical practice required, thereby saving analytic philosophers from Quine. That is, in fact, pretty much the way that Hughes reads him."

I think that Plantinga gets left out too often here. He was defending de re modality with great gusto in the late '60s and early '70s, along with Kripke. In fact, looking back, his attacks on Quine are much more precise than were Kripke's. I do think that Kripke has had more influence, partly because his attacks were embedded in such a masterful, yet accessible work in _Naming and Necessity_.

[john doris]

Thanks to Brian, and also his disinguished interlocuter, for a wonderful post.

My two cents: I've tended to think that "analytic philosophy" is characterized by something like Prof. Fodor's "method of sematic ascent." On this characterization, the term rings to my (unrepentantly naturalist) ears as one of abuse. I like to think of red-blooded naturalists who were trained in broadly analytic departments (say, like Stich) as "post-analytic."

jmd

[Jason Stanley]

There is a certain kind of very influential academic who has a difficult time recognizing that they are no longer a rebellious figure courageously struggling against the tide of contemporary opinion, but rather have already successfully directed the tide along the path of their choice. Chomsky is one such academic, and Fodor is another. I remember holding a reading group on Peacocke's *Study of Concepts* in the early 1990s in Cambridge. Most people there thought it was insane. The dominant view was that 'having a concept' was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time (a view with its own problems...). Fodor's own views have had such an immense effect on philosophers of my generation, that one of the worst insults you can level at someone of my generation is that they have mixed up epistemology and semantics (I'm somewhat of a throwback in that regard).
It's interesting that in Fodor's list of who is an analytic philosopher ("Peacocke, McDowell, Brandom, and Travis") he lists people who would be most likely to be considered on the analytic/continental dividing line by those in my generation (at least the latter 3). Coming up with a definition of "analytic philosopher" that counts Charles Travis, Robert Brandom and John McDowell as paradigm instances is a pretty damning condemnation of the proposed definition.
Indeed, if we take Fodor's proposed criteria at face-value, then we get Travis, Brandom, and McDowell as paradigm analytic philosophers (together with Michael Devitt, who characterizes understanding in terms of knowing-how). Tim Williamson and I argue that knowing-how is knowing that, and explicitly reject the thesis that intentional content is to be spelled out in terms of non-propositional knowledge-states. So I guess together with Fodor, we are continential philosophers. Perhaps Prof. Leiter can incorporate this fact into the rankings for Rutgers for '20th Century Continental Philosophy'...

[Jonathan Weinberg]

We have a tendency to consider the terms "analytic" and "Continental" to effect a sort of almost-partition of philosophers. (I say almost-partitions, since there is some overlap, e.g., Kant.) But perhaps there are just fissures in the Anglophone philosophical world that should no longer be papered over by lumping everyone under one term. (Of course, isn't that a paradigm analytic philosopher response: hey, everybody, let's make a distinction!) The instability in what to say about the 'Dummettians' seems some evidence for this. Also the split that John Doris notes between conceptual-analysis types and the more naturalistically inclined. (Though let's please not take up "post-analytic" as our label!)

A different thought on the matter is that the "analytic" in "analytic philosophy" today is a bit like the "Roman" in "Holy Roman Empire" (in, say, the 17th century). At the time in question, there's no literal content to it. There are good historical reasons for the word to be there, and the entity that it helps pick out at this time is clearly a later stage of the entity that it helped to pick out, in a more literal way, in the past. But don't look to get a meaning of the whole composed term on the basis of the meaning of its subparts. Rather, it can only be defined more historically, and in terms of a loosely unified blob arising from continued alliances of smaller semi-autonomous units....

[Stephen Frug]

Let me offer this, as a non-philosopher (former major, now closer to the domain of Fodor's nonexistant English-department friend). Setting aside Fodor's rather specific definition, and aiming for a definition along the lines of the 'clear writing', 'arguing', 'scientistic', etc, perhaps analytic philosophy is best understood as a literary tradition? It is largely Anglophone, but not necessarily so (Carnap); largely devoted to clear writing, but with some outliers, as will exist in any tradition, etc. Like any literary tradition, it contains diferent sub-categories. Different styles and emphasizes come and go. Under this reading, Derrida, and American philosophers who clearly work in his spirit, would be part of a different literary tradition, that of Franco-German philosophy (or are those two different traditions? I don't even know.)

Which tradition one belongs to has to do with which philosophers one feels like one is writing against the background of: who one reads, who one expects one's audience to have read, etc. My sense is that the later Wittgenstein would be an analytic philosopher by this definition, given how influential he is. Hegel probably isn't. Of course, one can campaign to retroactively introduce someone into the tradition, at times sucessfully. Kant, I would argue, is a figure before the start of the tradition, yet an influential one (like, say, Mary Shelly in SF).

I know that this is sort of messy as far as definitions go, not easy to draw boundaries on. But it strikes me as accurate to what analytic philosophy truly is, these days. I await correction by the better-informed.

SF

PS: On a related note, in his obituary notice, Brian Leiter said Derrida was not a philosopher. Is this really right, given the texts he worked on, the departments he taught in, and so on? Wouldn't it be more accurate, from Mr. Leiter's point of view, to say that Derrida was a *bad* philosopher? Even a terrible novelist is still a novelist, of sorts; George Bush is a politician...

[Gary Kemp]

Brian: Wouldn't most of us be happy to say that McDowell is a fringe character? You're right of course, it's important to preserve an historical distinction. I would say Hume is close to being an analytical philosopher by my criteria but he is not logically sufficiently self-conscious (my condition 2); I'm not sure that anyone could have been before 1879 (to me, the really prescient case here is Berkeley!). Jason: I think that's an acute point. As a beginning graduate student who had really only read some Carnap, Wittgenstein, I was first faced with Nathan Salmon lecturing on impossible worlds; I wanted to say something like 'but this is not analytic philosophy!' (or even: 'but this is not philosophy!'). I learned.

[Ralph Wedgwood]

Strange ... Isn't Fodor offering an analysis of the concept 'analytic philosophy'?!

At all events, Fodor's analysis of the concept seems wrong. As it is normally used, the term 'anaytic philosophy' names a philosophical *tradition* rather than a philosophical *doctrine*. The defining feature of analytic philosophers is, roughly, that they are vastly more likely to have read Frege, Russell, and Moore, or at least to have read philosophers who were deeply influenced by them, than continental philosophers (who in their turn are vastly more likely to have read Heidegger et al.).

Fodor's definition of analytic philosophy is about as plausible as the definition that Dummett offered in "The Origins of Analytic Philosophy", according to which Christopher Peacocke and Gareth Evans didn't count as analytic philosophers!

[Litowitz]

Amusing story: While studying for my doctorate at Loyola University in Chicago (I did continental philosophy and critical theory), we sponsored a meeting for undergrad students who were considering a philosophy major. One of the kids asked about the difference between analytic and continental philosophy, and a professor stood up and said, "The difference between analytic and continental philosophy lies in the place where they are practiced: Analytic philosophy is practiced in philosophy departments in the UK, Australia, and the United States, whereas Continental philosophy is practiced in bars and coffeeshops." My jaw just dropped.

Over the years, I've been struck by how little analytic philosophy has to say about culture, art, literature, sociology, and anything outside of a very narrow range of puzzles. For all their flaws (and they are legion) I would rather read Baudrillard-Derrida-Bourdieu-Debord than to read Putnam, Fodor, the Trolley Problem, etc. Just reading Fodor's piece reminded me of why I am so bored to death by analytic philosophy.

Rorty probably had it right in Consequences of Pragmatism when he said that analytic and continental philosophy are simply different ways of writing, different traditions, and there is no meta-standard by which to choose one. The lesson I guess is tolerance for the other guy's tradition.

[seth edenbaum]

The difference between the two is that one seeks to solve problems- as any science does- and the other seeks ways for us to function in a world of ambiguous perceptions and situations; and since I don't think we'll ever be able to leave ambiguity behind, and life would be pretty terrible if we could, I prefer the latter and find it more useful. Analytic philosophy has turned into something like Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's science of imaginary solutions.
Not that I'm a huge fan of continental philosophy either; there's always a deity lurking around there in the void. Novelists and lawyers can appreciate ambiguity without being tempted by faith. Philosophers, who are not proudly 'scientistic' in thought, can't seem to escape it.

[seth edenbaum]

removing the extra comma:
"Philosophers who are not proudly 'scientistic' in thought, can't seem to escape it."

[Matt]

A bit late now, but you can see what has long annoyed me about Fodor, his good jokes not withstanding, in his remarks about Quine and Dewey- his conflation of naturalism with individualism. If one doesn't think naturalism implies individualism, as it surely doesn't, then the supposed tight connection between semantic pragmatism and conceptual analysis just doesn't hold. This also makes Fodor's own project look much less interesting or necessary. I tend to think that the real tension in isn Fodor's own work- that much of his work, especially "special sciences", argues for naturalism but against individualism, but he's got an a priori commitment to individualism, so he doesn't follow the path where it leads. If you follow the argument of the Special sciences paper, one should not be afraid or ashamed to include sciology or sociolinguistics in the naturalist pantheon, even if they are not as well worked out as we'd like. And once we do that, then semantic pragmatism need not be a boggie man any longer. (I actually think that Wittgenstein is best read that way, though that's an idiosyncratic view.) But, it seems clear to me that Fodor's real problem is his comittment to individualism, and that if he dropped that he could get back easily enough to making fun of people playing Shmesh about possible worlds and the like.

[Wes Anderson]

Fodor says:
"Who among the living counts as an analytic philosopher by these jaundiced criteria? Not me, for sure. But practically everybody in Australia; Peacocke (see above), McDowell, Brandom, Travis (when he isn't being simply a nihilist), everybody in cognitive science without exception. And so forth. You needn't aim; just pull the trigger and you'll hit one.

He says he is not an analytic philosopher and then says that everyone, without exception, in cognitive science counts as an analytic philosopher. Is not Fodor himself "in cognitive science?"
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ruccs/people_faculty.php

Could someone clarify this for me? Thanks.