Michael Kremer (University of Chicago)

In the last years of his life, Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) tried to destroy any evidence of his correspondence and unpublished work, so that there would be no Ryle Nachlass. However, upon his retirement in 1968, he donated a collection of his books to the library at Linacre College, Oxford, supplemented at his death. These books hide unintended clues to his life: postcards and letters that he presumably had used as bookmarks—for example, a postcard from Edmund Husserl and a letter from A.J. Ayer. They also provide evidence of an otherwise unremarked, personal and intimate friendship between Ryle and another philosopher, Margaret MacDonald (1903–1956)—librarian at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford before the Second World War, and reader in philosophy at Bedford College, University of London, afterwards. In this talk, I present the evidence for this friendship, beginning with a single 8-page letter from MacDonald to Ryle, written by one intimate friend to another, which I show is part of a now-lost longer correspondence.

In the light of the hypothesis that Ryle and MacDonald were close friends and philosophical interlocutors, I explore the relationship between their respective philosophies. I argue that MacDonald, who had studied with Wittgenstein at Cambridge prior to coming to Oxford in 1937, was an important source of Wittgensteinian ideas in Ryle’s philosophy. In particular, Ryle very likely derived his famous distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that from her (she in turn may have derived it from Wittgenstein’s Blue Book). I show this through an analysis of her contribution to a 1937 Aristotelian Society Symposium on “Induction and Evidence,” in which Ryle also participated. There, MacDonald discusses “knowing rules” in the sense of “understanding and being able to apply them,” and as distinct from knowing them to be true. This discussion preceded by three years the first appearance of the idea of knowing-how in Ryle’s work, in his 1940 “Conscience and Moral Convictions.”

Time permitting I may discuss MacDonald’s and Ryle’s evolving conceptions of philosophical methodology. In her papers “The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy” (1938), “The Language of Political Theory” (1941), “Natural Rights” (1947), and “Ethics and the Ceremonial Use of Language” (1950), she moves from a therapeutic conception of philosophy as uncovering misleading analogies in language, to a more positive conception of philosophical analysis as bringing to bear multiple analogies, none of them without flaws, to illuminate problematic concepts. I contrast this methodology with Ryle’s examination of conceptual categories and reliance on the idea of a category mistake in “Categories” (1938), “Philosophical Arguments” (1945), and The Concept of Mind (1949). I discuss MacDonald’s insightful 1951 review of The Concept of Mind in which she applies her own methodology in criticizing Ryle’s use of analogies. I suggest that the shift in the weight he places on the notion of categories in his 1953 Tarner Lectures, Dilemmas, may be due in part to MacDonald’s influence.

 

Part of the UConn History of Analytic Philosophy Workshop.

Krzysztof Czerniawski (University of Warsaw)

Although we can discern some kind of pluralist remarks in the writings of pre-war philosophers such as Harry Acton and Arne Næss, the real history of pluralism begins with Wittgenstein and his Philosophical Investigations. It is only from that moment that we can see an uninterrupted line of philosophers interested in alethic pluralism. Contrary to deflationist interpretations of later Wittgenstein, he never believed that his remarks, including his use of equivalence schema, say something exhaustive and ultimate about truth, mainly because he did not believe in definitions and exhaustive explanations of any concepts. As was demonstrated by Gerald Vision, in §136 of Investigations, Wittgenstein tried to show that the concept of truth is a part of a language game in the same way as the concept of proposition and other logical concepts (Vision 2005, p. 170). Therefore we can come to the conclusion that we have different concepts of truth in different language games or, as Sara Ellenbogen puts it, “the nuances in the meaning of «is true» are as various as the language games in which we use it” (Ellenbogen 2003, p. 72).

That is our conclusion, not Wittgenstein’s, who never explicitly endorsed a pluralist theory of truth. Probably first philosopher who did this was Friedrich Waismann, who inherited linguistic pluralism from Wittgenstein, but wrote about “language strata”, not “language games”. He thought that in different language strata we use different systems of logic or concepts of verifiability, and, what is most interesting from our point of view, different senses of truth. According to him: “a physical law cannot be true in the same sense in which, say, a description of this building is, and the latter description cannot be true in the same sense in which a statement like «I’ve got a headache» is” (Waismann 1968, p. 98). Ultimately, Waismann wrote that the word truth “is used on many different levels and in many different senses. It has a systematic ambiguity” (Waismann 1968, p. 99).

Waismann’s idea of “language strata” was not as popular as Wittgensteinian language games and consequently his pluralist theory of truth, connected with this idea, became forgotten. A similar fate was met by the alethic pluralism of Wilfrid Sellars, which was only part of his more general endeavor to analyse truth in terms of “semantic assertability”. That’s why the future development of pluralism about truth did not come from the line Wittgenstein – Waismann, or from Sellars, but from Michael Dummett. The British philosopher wanted to decide which concept of truth, realist or antirealist, should be applied to different classes of statements. The program of Dummett opens the possibility of the existence of different kinds of truths in different discourses. But in reality Dummett tried to argue generally in favour of his antirealism and it is only with his student, Crispin Wright, that we see a real endorsement of his original idea. At the same time Putnam rediscovered the alethic pluralism of later Wittgenstein. In Truth and Objectivity, Crispin Wright tried to develop new philosophical tools to discern between realism and antirealism in different domains, and it is with this book that a pluralist theory of truth becomes part of a philosophical mainstream.

Bibliography

Ellenbogen, Sara (2003). Wittgenstein’s Account of Truth. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Vision, Gerald (2005). ‘The Truth about Philosophical Investigations I §§ 134 – 137’, Philosophical Investigations 28 (2): 159–76.

Waismann, Friedrich (1968). How I See Philosophy. London: Macmillan.

 

Part of the UConn History of Analytic Philosophy Workshop.

Philip A. Ebert (Stirling)

This paper has two aims: first to characterise four different solutions to the problem of analysis and show how these affect in fundamental ways an interpretation of Frege’s logicist project. Second, to offer a defence of an often-neglected view — called the (term by term) reference preservation view of analysis — against numerous criticisms, most notably those offered by Blanchette (2012). These criticisms center on the claim that there seems to be a certain degree of arbitrariness in Frege’s definition of number. In response, I will distinguish three different charges of arbitrariness and argue that each can me met.

 

Part of the UConn History of Analytic Philosophy Workshop.