When I was in graduate school in the early 1990’s, we were told that philosophy of language was over, and philosophy of mind was the future of philosophical research. Here was the standard story. In the dark days of Twentieth Century philosophy, language had a privileged place; some philosophers even held that all philosophical problems were fundamentally problems about language. People soon realized that this was incorrect. Even after we were perfectly clear about the grammar and meaning of the philosophically controversial claims, many philosophical problems remained (such as whether the perfectly clear controversial claim was true). But the excessive focus on language remained. In investigating the philosophical problem of intentionality, the problem of how representational elements come to be about the things in the world they represent, philosophers focused in the first instance on linguistic representations. But this was a mistake.
Paul Grice came on the scene, and showed how to reduce linguistic meaning to lots of facts about intentions. This led philosophers to recognize that questions about the intentionality of language – and indeed philosophical questions about language generally – were really misplaced questions that genuinely should be about mental states. Looking at properties of language was looking at the wrong place. As my thesis advisor put the point to me once, looking at language for elucidation about intentionality involved making the same mistake as the man who looks under a streetlight for the keys he dropped, on the grounds that the street where he dropped the keys had no streetlight. One of the central morals of Twentieth Century philosophy, according to this story, is that there really was no philosophical interest in studying language. Now that this confusion was cleared up, philosophical progress could really be made, as everyone turned their attention to studying the mind (if you want to get the flavor of those times, look at Tyler Burge’s contribution “Philosophy of Language and Mind: 1950-1990”, in the centenary issue of The Philosophical Review).
As far as I can tell, the future that was supposed to happen never occurred. Though the philosophy of mind is a healthy sub-field of philosophy, no great revolution occurred there in the 1990’s, and the philosophical study of language (and its allied field, philosophical logic) continue to provide a rich and interesting source of problems and insights. Furthermore, considerations from philosophy of language continue to be deeply relevant in a wide variety of disciplines (e.g. epistemology, metaphysics, and metaethics). This is not to deny that interesting things have occurred in the philosophy of mind; the study of consciousness has flourished, stoked in large part by the innovative work of David Chalmers and others. But much of the debate in this area too involves reconfigured debates from the philosophy of language.
So what happened? Why is philosophy of language still a major source of philosophical insight and activity, and philosophy of mind (at least of the relatively a prioristic variety) perhaps somewhat less active than it has been in the past? I think there are several reasons. Looking back on the last thirty-five years, perhaps the most interesting and philosophically fruitful inquiry outside of political philosophy and ethics was the intensive study of conditional and counterfactual sentences. Real progress was made in understanding these ubiquitous linguistic constructions, and genuine puzzles emerged (such as David Lewis’s triviality results), with which we are still grappling. Some people took these puzzles (rightly or wrongly) to motivate radical new theories of content (expressivism). In general, intensive focus by the community on conditionals and counterfactual constructions clearly led to philosophical progress, both in understanding these constructions, and in recognizing new possibilities. It is this kind of work that inspired philosophers to look for other linguistic constructions, the study of which could be equally fruitful. In contrast, it’s not clear how to use the insight that the intentionality of mind is prior to the intentionality of language to break new ground. The intentionality of the mental is prior to the intentionality of language: now what?
Secondly, philosophy of language and philosophical logic have clear methodologies. In producing a systematic account of the meaning of a certain kind of linguistic construction, there are wrong answers (lots of them). If your theory of X in metaphysics entails certain facts about the meanings of some sentences, those are consequences that we know how to evaluate. In contrast, the methodology of (relatively a prioristic) philosophy of mind was the thought experiment, and the thought experiment proved to be a difficult methodology to control. Indeed, much of philosophy of mind became the study of this methodology, and why it is so difficult to control (i.e. questions about the relation between conceivability and possibility).
I’m not sure what moral to draw from this tiny slice of the history of philosophy I’ve lived through. Perhaps it is that having a reliable methodology is the best path to breaking new ground, and if you don’t, what you’re going to be spending your time doing is wondering about the methodology.
UPDATE: I've received too many interesting e-mails about this, so now I'm opening up comments...
-Jason Stanley
