Via Weatherson, I see that the irascible (and sometimes idiosyncratic and dogmatic [cf. paragraph 7]) Peter Hacker has a rather savage and critical review of Williamson's The Philosophy of Philosophy. In the hopes of clarifying what's really at issue here, I thought I would single out a substantive criticism from Hacker's review and invite reader comments on its merits. This is from p. 343 of the review:
Having shown to his satisfaction that philosophical truths are not generally about words or concepts, Williamson queries how philosophy might nevertheless still be an armchair activity that aims at conceptual truths. Since confinement to an armchair does not deprive one of one's linguistic competence, perhaps conceptual truths are those that can be achieved merely through reflection on that competence. This might be so, he writes (pp. 50–1), if all, or all core, philosophical truths were analytic in some sense which imposed no constraints upon the world and hence could be known from the depths of an armchair. Williamson suggests that this view was embraced by those analytic philosophers who believed that philosophical truths are linguistic or conceptual. But this is demonstrably false. Among Oxford philosophers who took 'the linguistic turn', the only significant one who thought that all philosophical propositions are analytic was Ayer (at the age of 26). The manifesto of the Vienna Circle followed Wittgenstein in denying that there are any philosophical propositions. Ryle, Austin, Strawson and others did think there are, but nowhere suggested that they are analytic. All insisted that philosophy is a conceptual investigation, but none held that its task is to disclose analytic truths. It is therefore astonishing that Williamson decides to use 'analytic' and 'conceptual' interchangeably (p. 50). So conceptual truths are analytic, according to Williamson. This is not only historically unwarranted, it is also arguably philosophically misconceived. Such philosophical assertions as 'Idealism and materialism are both answers to an improper question' (Ryle), 'Material objects and persons are the basic particulars of our conceptual scheme' (Strawson), or 'There can be no such thing as a "private language" ' (Wittgenstein), are not analytic, and their proponents did not hold them to be. But they are conceptual truths.
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