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Texto Completo (Pdf) teorema Vol. XXXII/1, 2013, pp. 5-17 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2013) 32:1; pp. 5-17 Introduction: Dummett’s Legacy Karen Green When, in the future, philosophers look back on the great philosophical works of the twentieth century, they will surely see them as being character- ized by the rise and dominance of questions about language, not apparent in previous centuries. Among English speaking philosophers, this trend has been particularly evident. And, among twentieth century British philoso- phers, none was more committed to the centrality of the philosophy of lan- guage to the pursuit of philosophy than was Michael Dummett [Dummett (1988); (1993)]. According to Dummett the theory of meaning is first phi- losophy, and metaphysics and epistemology are best understood when it is recognized that the problems they deal with are fundamentally issues con- cerning the truth conditions of sentences, and the ways in which we can come to know whether sentences are true or false. Thus the great metaphysical questions of realism, phenomenalism, and idealism come to be seen as se- mantic issues in disguise. Dummett’s career, which spanned the second half of the twentieth cen- tury, coincided with the rise and fall of the dominance of academic philoso- phy of language. At the height of this period the ‘linguistic turn’ in Anglo- American philosophy was ubiquitous, and the philosophers with whom Dummett personally engaged were all deeply involved with it. His doctoral supervisor, Elizabeth Anscombe was famous as the translator of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and perhaps no-one was more responsible for promoting the linguistic turn than Wittgenstein, for whom philosophical problems came to be seen as confusions grounded in mistakes and muddles of grammar. But Wittgenstein, who owed his career to Bertrand Russell, would never have discovered the centrality of linguistic analysis to philosophical issues had he and Russell not engaged with the philosophy of Gottlob Frege, and his outstanding advances in formulating predicate logic at the close of the nineteenth century. The twentieth century, as the century in which linguistic analysis, and the philosophy of language, came to dominate, 5 6 Karen Green could be deemed Frege’s legacy, and no-one has been more assiduous in building on this inheritance than Dummett. Dummett’s Frege. Philosophy of Language (1973) was the single most important work to bring to the attention of philosophers the fundamental place that Frege’s philosophy had occupied in the development of the ana- lytic school. True, J. L. Austin had published his translation of Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmatic in 1950 [Frege (1950)], and this was followed by Montgomery Furth’s translation of the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik [Frege (1964)], but the philosophical significance of these works was made manifest to a far wider audience by Dummett’s book. Here we publish for the first time the English original of the preface which Dummett wrote for the Italian translation, which came out in 1983 [Dummett (1983)]. In this preface Dummett reiterates the foundational character of Frege’s philosophy, arguing that in formulating his logic he contributed to the most fundamental part of philosophy; that is, the ‘philosophy of thought’, the attempt the see aright the nature and structure of our thought. In this preface one can see Dummett pre- cisifying his claim that Frege should be interpreted as a philosopher of lan- guage, in the light of criticisms of his book on Frege discussed in The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy [Dummett (1981)]. Dummett here makes it characteristic of analytic philosophy that those who belong to this tradition accept that it is not possible to explain how language functions, by making use of a supposedly prior account of what it is to have thoughts. Explaining how it is that language functions, and how language expresses thoughts by means of words, is what is involved in the philosophy of language and will ‘simultaneously comprise a philosophy of thought’. He points out that on this criterion there is some question as to whether Frege should be thought of as an analytic philosopher, since he held both, that ‘there is no contradiction in supposing the existence of beings who can think the very same thoughts as we do without having to clothe then in sensible (e.g. spoken or written) form,’ and that ‘we are incapable of grasping a thought save as expressed lin- guistically or symbolically’. This complicates the attribution to him of the fundamental assumption of analytic philosophers. Nevertheless, Dummett ar- gues, in practice he analyzed the structure of thought by means of an account of the structure of language, though, as he here confesses, it is not very clear how he understood the relationship between the formal language he con- structed and natural language, which he often characterized as defective. In considering the relationship between natural language and formal languages Dummett considers the view that a formal language makes clear the structure that natural languages possess, and that it corresponds to a ‘deep structure’ in Chomsky’s sense, that ‘actually represents the first stage in the largely unconscious psychological process by which the speaker who utters the sentence has come to form it in accordance with the grammar of the lan- guage which he has “internalized”‘. He shelves this problem, commenting Introduction: Dummett’s Legacy 7 that, ‘the problem lies at the heart of our current difficulties in explaining what it is for someone to know a language’. As the contributions to this col- lection attest these difficulties have not been overcome, yet it is central to Dummett’s legacy that he has brought them to the fore. In the United States, Frege’s legacy was taken up by Alonzo Church, Rudolph Carnap and ultimately by Carnap’s student Willard van Orman Quine, who, while he had inherited the method of linguistic analysis from Frege, came to be diametrically opposed to him on metaphysical issues, ques- tioning the Platonism about numbers and other abstract objects, associated with Frege, as well as the coherence of notions of sense and intension as de- veloped by Carnap. In the late 1960s, Quine’s student, Donald Davidson, building on Alfred Tarski’s work on truth definitions, argued that a theory of meaning for a lan- guage could be given without recourse to obscure intensional concepts of meaning [Davidson (1967)]. He proposed that by constructing a theory of truth for a language one would, in effect, provide a theory of meaning for it. For a decade or more during the 1970s and 80s, the Davidsonian program was a central plank of Anglo-American philosophy of language, to be finally overcome by new directions in semantic analysis, inspired by progress in the formal semantics for intensional languages. By the end of the century Quine’s qualms concerning the coherence of intensional vocabulary had been swept away, and possible world semantics had acquired philosophical re- spectability. But the philosophy of language was already waning, itself being overtaken by cognitive science and new programs in the philosophy of mind, and teleo-semantics, which attempt to analyze the content of thought directly, rather than, as Dummett had prescribed, by way of the analysis of language. Dummett’s legacy is intricately bound up with the central disputes in philosophy of language that developed during this period, and partly flows from his engagement with the works of his trans-Atlantic peers. One might argue, perhaps too simplistically, that throughout his career, he has tried to steer a middle way between Frege and Wittgenstein. He accepts, from Witt- genstein that an account of meaning must be grounded in an account of the use that we actually make of sentences, yet resists the radical conventional- ism that he takes Wittgenstein to draw from this [Dummett (1959a); (1993b)]. He rejects, also, the conclusions of the empiricist Quine, that a sci- entific examination of the contexts of use and acquisition of language dem- onstrate that there is no place for abstract entities, whether numbers, intensions, or meanings, in a purified ontology that reflects the commitments of empirical science. He argues, against Quine, that actual indeterminacy of translation does not undermine the possibility of giving a precise account of the meanings of expressions in those parts of the language where meaning can be seen to be determinate [Dummett (1974)]. Thus meaning, and notions such as truth in virtue of meaning, rejected by Quine, can be made scientifi- 8 Karen Green cally respectable, and indeed need to be made so, if we are going to be able to justify our deductive practice [Dummett (1973a); (1991a)]. During the seventies, he agreed with Davidson that the construction of a truth theory for a language would be a central element in the construction of a theory of meaning for it, but he denied that an adequate theory of mean- ing centered on truth and reference would be able to do away with the con- cept of sense. It would either already amount to a theory of the sense of expressions of a language, or alternatively, need to be supplemented with one [Dummett (1975a); (1976)]. What is most distinctive about the way in which Dummett has ap- proached these questions within the philosophy of language is his application of ideas derived from intuitionist philosophy of mathematics to them. In or- der to develop a middle way, between the obscurity of Platonism, with its immaterial abstract objects that are known through a puzzling faculty of in- tuition, and the austere nominalist rejection of belief in anything that we can- not see, hear, taste, touch or smell, Dummett proposes a moderate constructivism in mathematics, and explores the applicability of constructiv- ist notions of truth in other areas.
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