Replies to My Commentators

teorema Vol. XXX/1, 2011, pp. 115-144 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2011) 30:1; pp. 115-144] Replies to My Commentators Hans-Johann Glock I am very grateful to Professor Luis Valdés for instigating and oversee- ing this project. It is a privilege to have a roster of such distinguished schol- ars pay attention to one’s work. Of course I am also grateful to the contributors. Whether by chance or design, between them they have raised what I take to be the most important and controversial ideas in the book, and without redundancy. Reading their comments was an enjoyable experience, if also an educational and sobering one. Almost all of the criticisms have been friendly and constructive, and I hope to be able to respond accordingly. Le- gitimate worries about the possibility of philosophical progress notwithstand- ing, it is at least tempting to feel confident that when it comes to the meta- philosophical and historical understanding of analytic philosophy, some progress can be made. I have divided my responses according to topic rather than commentator, while also indicating in the headings whose contributions will be discussed. I. DEFINING ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY (DUMMETT, MARCONI, MONK) My stated ambition was to answer the question ‘What is Analytic Phi- losophy?’ I was therefore disappointed to read that Michael Dummett could not find ‘any such answer’ in the book. Fortunately my spirits were lifted when I remembered that my answer is explicitly and prominently stated at least three times in the text. It also features on the back cover, which Dummett must have read, since he refers to the generous blurb by David Stern: ‘analytic philosophy is a lose movement held together both by ties of influence and by various “family resemblances”’. My reasons for combining a family-resemblance and a genetic/historical account are developed at length in chapter 8 and summarized in the Introduction [pp. 19-20; see also pp. 223-4]1. On the one hand, merely rely- ing on family-resemblances would overshoot the acknowledged extension of the term, since overlapping strands relate analytic philosophers to some non- analytic philosophers no less than to each other. On the other hand, merely re- 115 116 Hans-Johann Glock lying on historical ties of influence leaves the problem that such ties extend be- yond the analytic tradition as commonly recognized, both backwards and for- wards, and there have even been notable cases of mutual influence. Curiously enough, Dummett himself quotes one of the plain formula- tions of the answer he purports not to have found [from p. 231]. His real gripe is that the book will not put a reader in a position to ‘recognise’ a piece of writing as belonging to analytic philosophy, ‘unless he were already famil- iar with some of the specimens of it that Glock refers to’. According to Dummett, a ‘skilful verbal characterisation of baroque art or architecture, without illustrations, should put the reader in a favourable position to make a good guess at whether a painting or building which he is shown does or does not exemplify that style. Similarly, a verbal characterisation of analytic philosophy should put the reader in a favourable position to make a good guess at whether or not something that he reads is a product of that philosophical school’. But this demand ignores one part of my account, according to which being a text of analytic philosophy depends partly on belonging to a historical tradition. Such membership may not be evident from a philosophical text. And to the extent that it is, for instance through references to particular works, thinkers, schools or labelled problems or theories, my book will put attentive readers in a favourable position to tell. For it discusses at length how various figures and schools fit into that tradition according to various historical and philosophical parameters. Of course no characterisation, however skilful, could put a reader in a position to know for certain whether an anonymous text bereft of historical references belongs to a certain genetic category. Incidentally, this holds just as much for the architectural categories Dummett invokes. In so far as they are genetic (as when we distinguish between gothic and neo-gothic buildings), a mere description of a specimen will not put one in a position to assign it to one of them, and even visual acquaint- ance need not be sufficient to settle the matter. Dummett does take note of the second part of my account, yet com- plains that ‘[Glock] says very little of what the [family] resemblances are between different examples of analytic philosophy and an archetypal instance of it’. This statement betokens a misunderstanding of the notion of family resemblance, both as Wittgenstein develops it by reference to ‘game’ and as I clarify and apply it to ‘analytic philosophy’. The idea is not that there are resemblances radiating out from a central archetypal instance, but that there are overlapping features running through some but not all of the instances. In any event, the complaint that I have said very little about the features shared by many though not all analytic philosophers is quite wrong. On page 218 there is a prominent diagram showing the degree to which archetypal specimens of analytic philosophy form a family on account of sharing certain pertinent features. While there may be a need to add further features, all of the ones listed are discussed at great length in the preceding parts of the book. And so are Replies to My Commentators 117 additional thinkers or schools that help to determine the contours of analytic philosophy, including not just paradigmatic specimens but also borderline cases [e.g. pp. 15-6, pp. 214-9, pp. 224-30]. Extending the open-ended category ‘analytic philosophy’ to novel texts would indeed be greatly facilitated by familiarity with specimens of analytic writing. But why shouldn’t it be? The same holds true for taxonomic classifi- cations in art and architecture. Furthermore, even my descriptions of the overlapping features shared by many though not all analytic authors will help to assign a text by Frege, Moore, Carnap, Ryle, Austin, Quine or Lewis to analytic philosophy. Unlike Dummett, both Diego Marconi and Ray Monk recognize not just my answer to the title question, but also the reasons that lie behind it. They are even minded to accept it as correct. At the same time, there are also points on which they agree with Dummett. My answer is not as helpful (Marconi) or substantial (Monk) as I seem to believe. Marconi regards my answer as ‘extensionally accurate’, yet fears that it is insufficiently ‘vivid’ or ‘physiognomic’ [this issue, pp. 23-24]. He pro- poses an ‘extensionally equivalent’ but ‘perhaps more vivid’ alternative. It amounts to an interesting variant of what I called the rationalist conception. I shall attend to that proposal below. At this juncture I should merely like to grant that this characterization would be easier to apply than mine, since it omits historical factors and focuses on a narrower range of descriptive features. I hope, however, that my account is not quite as cumbersome and arti- ficial as Marconi would have it. He doubts the wisdom of explaining to a layperson what an analytic philosopher is by telling her that it is someone who was influenced by at least one of its emblematic figures and satisfies a sufficient subset of features from my list of family-resemblances. But even if this casts me in a dreadful light, I confess that I would have no compunction about answering the question somewhat as follows: analytic philosophy is the most influential philosophical tradition of contempo- rary Western philosophy. It predominates in Anglophone countries, and is the single most important movement in continental Europe… Analytic philosophy emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century in the work of Frege, Moore, and Russell, work that mainly concerned the formal and philosophical aspects of logic, semantics and metaphysics. It then took a linguistic turn through the early Wittgenstein and the logical positivists. Two distinctive branches emerged in the 1930s, logical constructionism on the one hand, conceptual analysis on the other…. Analytic philosophy is a highly diverse movement. Nevertheless there are some overlapping doctrinal, methodological and stylistic features that are shared by many – though not all – analytic philosophers from its inception to the present day. These include… 118 Hans-Johann Glock Properly done, this would indeed ‘require some time and quite a few examples’, as Marconi notes. I think it would be time well spent. According to Monk, I have not really provided even a non-analytic definition of the kind that I promise. He is kind enough, however, to regard this is ‘a strength rather than a weakness’. Monk shares Wittgenstein’s dislike for ‘What is X?’ questions, let alone the attempt to answer them through a definition. My account, despite my ‘stated aims in producing it, does justice to that fluidity [of our notion of analytic philosophy]’. Yet it does so only be- cause in effect it amounts to a Wittgensteinian answer. ‘First one enumerates a list of things that are correctly called “analytic philosophy” (Glock’s genetic conception), then one adds “and similar things” (his family resemblance conception)’ [this issue, p. 39]. In some ways, my account plainly goes be- yond this. It states a rationale for why some things count as generally ac- cepted specimen of analytic philosophy – namely membership in a historical tradition. I also indicate pertinent respects in which things can be similar; and I state reasons for thinking that these amount not to necessary and sufficient conditions, but only to family resemblances.

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