Fundamental disagreements in epistemology arise from legitimate differences of interest, not genuine conflict. It is because of such differences that there are three varieties of epistemology: naturalistic, subjective, and what I shall call epistemology-as-logic. All three have been with us at least since Socrates. My chief concern will be with the third, but I must begin with the first and second, which constitute standard epistemology.

One of the most characteristic claims of the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as the philosophy of ordinary language, is that traditional philosophical discourse has usually been logically improper because it has depended upon systematic misuses of certain expressions in ordinary language and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with the description of the actual use of language. To substantiate this claim, the philosopher of ordinary language has had (...) to establish at least the following two general philosophical theses, which together seem to constitute the hard core of original doctrine in the philosophy of ordinary language. First, that the meaning of an expression is its use and not its referent or what it corresponds to. Second, that the description of the uses of certain expressions in language is not merely a study of words but genuinely solves the same problems which traditional philosophy had tried to solve through other methods. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine two major arguments in favour of the philosophical thesis that the meaning of an expression is its use, and not its referent or what it corresponds to. A second philosophical thesis which is closely related to the first is that the study of the ordinary, “actual” uses of certain expressions is not of purely linguistic interest but in fact is a way, probably the only proper way, of solving the problems of traditional (...) philosophy; in the sequel to the present article, we shall examine one major argument in favour of this second thesis. Both theses occupy a place of central importance in the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as “the philosophy of ordinary language”. Together they seem to constitute the basis of the most characteristic claim of this movement: that traditional philosophic discourse is logically improper and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with “the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language” by describing “the actual use of language”. Both theses are necessary for the justifi cation of this more general claim. (shrink)

Are there nonexistent things? What is the nature of informative identity statements? Are the notions of essential property and of essence intelligible, and, if so, how are they to be understood? Are individual things material substances or clusters of qualities? Can the account of the unity of a complex entity avoid vicious infinite regresses? These questions have attracted widespread attention among philosophers recently, as evidenced by a proliferation of articles in the leading philosophical journals. In Being Qua Being they receive (...) systematic, unified treatment, grounded in an account of the nature of the application to the world of our conceptual apparatus. A central thesis of the book is that the topic of identity is primary, and that existence and predication, both essential and accidental, are to be understood in terms of identity. (shrink)

not analytic. This seems to be the point of Kant's claim that the concept of the sum of seven and five does not include its equality to the number twelve ...

Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human knowledge, and antirealist metaphysics holds that the world depends on our cognitive capacities. But humans good and knowledge, including their language and concepts, are empirical matters, whereas philosophers do not engage in empirical research. And humans are inhabitants, not 'makers', of the world. Nevertheless, all three can be drastically reinterpreted as making no reference to humans.".

One of the most important and perennially debated philosophical questions is whether we can have knowledge of the external world. Butchvarov here considers whether and how skepticism with regard to such knowledge can be refuted or at least answered. He argues that only a direct realist view of perception has any hope of providing a compelling response to the skeptic and introduces the radical innovation that the direct object of perceptual, and even dreaming and hallucinatory, experience is always a (...) material object, but not necessarily one that actually exists. This leads him to a metaphysics in which reality is ultimately constructed by human decisions out of objects that are ontologically more basic but which cannot be said in themselves to be either real or unreal. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II.

AT THE end of the earliest exposition of his emotive theory of ethics, Charles Stevenson acknowledged that the obvious response of many would be: "When we ask 'Is X good?' we don't want mere influence, mere advice.... We want our interests to be guided by... truth, and by nothing else. To substitute for such a truth mere emotive meaning and suggestion is to conceal from us the very object of our search." To this Stevenson replied: "I can only answer that (...) I do not understand. What is this truth to be about?... I find no indefinable property, nor do I know what to look for." Perhaps Stevenson might be excused for not trying harder. But no excuse is available for the failure of recent moral philosophy as a whole to do so. (shrink)

General statements have been the chief subject matter of logic since Aristotle’s syllogistic. They have also been a fundamental concern of metaphysics, though only since Frege invented modern quantification theory. Indeed, logicians and even metaphysicians seldom ask what, if anything, general statements correspond to in the world. But Frege and Russell did, and the question became a major theme in Wittgenstein’s early (pre-1929) and Gustav Bergmann’s later (post- 1959) works. All four were aware that, as Bergmann put it in his (...) posthumously published New Foundations of Ontology, there could not be any laws of nature if generality were not in the world.[i] Generality must be in the world if the world is at all how science, indeed any cognition beyond that of babes, takes it to be. This is why all four were also aware of the tie of the topic to what became known as the realism/antirealism issue.[ii]. (shrink)

Are there nonexistent things? What is the nature of informative identity statements? Are the notions of essential property and of essence intelligible, and, if so, how are they to be understood? Are individual things material substances or clusters of qualities? Can the account of the unity of a complex entity avoid vicious infinite regresses? These questions have attracted widespread attention among philosophers recently, as evidenced by a proliferation of articles in the leading philosophical journals. In Being Qua Being they receive (...) systematic, unified treatment, grounded in an account of the nature of the application to the world of our conceptual apparatus. A central thesis of the book is that the topic of identity is primary, and that existence and predication, both essential and accidental, are to be understood in terms of identity. (shrink)

But how can any entity be not self-identical? If it is both itself and another, then it is not an entity but a pair of entities. At best, an entity which is not self-identical is a series of concrete, self-identical, unchanging entities, parallel to what Whitehead calls "personal order." But even then the series itself would be self-identical qua a series, although its constituents exhibit successive differences. Therefore, to speak of entities which are not self-identical is either not precise or (...) contradictory. It is not precise if two or more entities are referred to as one entity, even if this one entity is then said to be not self-identical. It is contradictory if a self-identical series or collection of self-identical entities is called a non-self-identical entity. Therefore, for the same reason for which a concrete entity cannot change, no entity can change. (shrink)

It is too early to judge how 20th century philosophy ended, but its beginning was remarkable. Both Moore’s Principia Ethica and Russell’s Principles of Mathematics appeared in 1903, the first volume of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in 1900-01, and four of William James’s major philosophical books in 1902-09. There was not a significant difference, except in style and temperament, between Anglo-American and European philosophers. The analytic/continental schism came much later. Both Russell and Husserl began as mathematicians. Moore wrote in the preface (...) of Principia that his ethics was closest to Brentano’s. Russell studied and discussed Frege and Meinong in detail. James was admired in Britain and in Europe, influenced Husserl and Wittgenstein, and was the subject of articles by Moore and Russell. (shrink)