Recent discussions in the history of analytic philosophy have targeted questions about the concept of ‘Analytic Philosophy’ itself. Scholars, such as Glock (2008) and Preston (2004), have argued that ‘Analytic Philosophy’ cannot plausibly be characterised in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and that other, more pragmatic, approaches must be taken instead. In this paper, we argue that similar questions that have recently emerged about the status of ‘Western Philosophy’ can be informed by these debates in the history of analytic (...) philosophy. Some recent scholars, most notably Platzky Miller (2023) and Cantor (2022), have argued that the concept of ‘Western philosophy’ should be abandoned altogether, due to its incoherence and the role it plays in upholding and perpetuating various exclusionary mechanisms and politically dubious aims. The aim of this paper is to apply the lessons learnt from similar discussions about ‘Analytic Philosophy’ and to build on Platzky Miller’s and Cantor’s innovative proposals. We argue that the term should not be abandoned altogether and that continuing to use it is required for combating exclusions in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that discussions of Frege’s conception of elucidation have suffered from a conflation of two distinct issues: elucidation of primitive scientific terms, and elucidation of the logical categories. The former seeks to bring us to grasp the Bedeutung of terms that stand at the beginning of the chain of definitions of a scientific system. The latter cannot be understood on the model of securing agreement in Bedeutung at all. I show how existing discussions of Fregean elucidation insufficiently take this (...) difference into account. I adumbrate what I take to be a more accurate understanding of Fregean elucidation of the logical categories, starting from the observation that Frege, when engaged in such elucidation, consistently reverts to talking about signs. Frege, I argue, takes signs to possess logical features, and it is these logical features which his elucidations are meant to help us to grasp. For Frege, the nature of the logical categories lies in the signs. In this way, I argue, Frege’s approach to elucidating the logical categories is incompatible with a realist conception according to which there is a logical order of reality that is prior to the logical order of language. (shrink)

At the end of Frank Ramsey’s “General Propositions and Causality” ([1929b] 1990), he offers an enigmatic footnote that briefly describes his philosophy of science as a “forecasting theory”. What he means by this and by a “forecast” is unclear. However, elsewhere in his unpublished notes, he uses the term sporadically. An examination of those notes reveals the skeleton of a behavioral theory of mind. Ramsey held that all actions are at root driven by the sum total of a person’s dispositions (...) or habits. These habits operate in an unconscious process that produces psychological expectations about the realization of desires. When those expectations are frustrated, the violation is registered consciously to the individual as a proposition, and the offending habit is identified. Humans can then regulate and change those habits by the conscious application of logic through deliberation. The applicable logic is Ramsey’s decision theory, which aims to make beliefs probabilistically coherent by adopting the laws and chances that signify the habits people might use for guiding behavior. The outcome of this deliberation is to refashion psychological expectations as mathematical expectations on laws and chances. These mathematical expectations are forecasts, and a forecasting theory of science takes scientific theories to provide forecasts. (shrink)

This paper reinterprets doxastic sentimentalism and neutral monism, as these doctrines appear in Bertrand Russell’s “On Propositions” (1919) and The Analysis of Mind (1921). It argues that Russell’s theory of belief, in this particular period, posited at least seven distinct types of feeling, but only one type of entity. The paper’s principal thesis is that Russell treated believing as feelings, but it also draws the conclusions that monism and sentimentalism are logically independent of one another, and that sentimentalism and (at (...) least one type of) behaviorism are inconsistent, qua theories of belief. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman’s paper ‘About’ (1961) was a milestone in aboutness theory. Although it has been much discussed, an interesting fact about it has so far been completely ignored: the important debt it owes to two papers it cites by Gilbert Ryle. With Ryle’s ‘About’ (1933) it shares much more than the title – it, too, offers a three-fold account of different ways a sentence can relate to a subject matter and a separate account for fictitious objects. More importantly, although Goodman’s (...) approach is quite different, the inspiration for the crucial element in his account, ‘differential consequence’, may well have come from a parenthetical suggestion of entailment in Ryle’s ‘About’. The second essential tool Goodman uses, viz. compound predicates which incorporate the (fictitious) object, is also the crucial element in Ryle’s ‘Imaginary Objects’ (also 1933). Goodman turns them into a predicate schema for fictitious subject matters as well as for a nominalist version of his account. (shrink)

This paper offers a defence of sense-datum statements from A.J. Ayer’s perspective that represents a response to Quine’s naturalistic ontology. Starting with Quine’s “On What There Is” (1948), and the following “Symposium” of 1951, I argue that Ayer’s proposed method of establishing sense-datum statements in his “Symposium” piece, which challenges Quine’s ontology of physical objects, is not a viable alternative to Quine’s scientific naturalism. I argue that by taking a broadly intensional approach, Ayer can offer a response to Quine’s position. (...) More specifically, I contend that it is possible to form a distinctly non-scientific, epistemological account of sense-data by employing primitive “sensory predicates” within basic propositions. In terms of ontology, a technical ruling for “existence”, working alongside appropriate “meaning-rules”, legislates for basic sense-datum statements, thus distancing them from the regimented, extensionalised, stimulus meaning strategy indicative of Quine’s naturalistic ontology. (shrink)

Frege maintains that there are not two distinct acts, assertion and denial; rather, denying p is one and the same as asserting not-p. Wittgenstein appears not to recognise this identity in Frege, attributing to him the contrary view that a proposition may have one of two verbs, "is true" or "is false". This paper explains Wittgenstein’s attribution as a consequence of Frege’s treatment of content as theoretically prior to the act of judgment. Where content is prior to judgment, the denial (...) of p—what is rejected in asserting p—is distinct from the assertion of not-p. Wittgenstein’s own embrace of Frege’s identity is then considered, an embrace explained in part by his repudiation of Frege’s theoretical order. (shrink)

Frank Ramsey’s philosophy, developed in the 1920s in Cambridge, was in conversation with the debates surrounding intellectualism in the early twentieth century. Ramsey made his mark on the anti-intellectualist tradition via his notion of habit. He posited that human judgments take shape through habitual processes, and he rejected the separation between the domain of reason, on one hand, and the domain of habit, on the other. Ramsey also provided the ground to explore the nature of knowledge employed in acting from (...) habit. That ground was passed onto Margaret MacDonald who came up with the distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to apply a rule (or habit), the distinction that set the stage for Gilbert Ryle’s philosophical project against intellectualism from the 1940s onward. Ramsey thus influenced Ryle’s account of knowledge through the channel of MacDonald. (shrink)

This paper uses the concept of metalinguistic negotiation, drawn from contemporary philosophy of language, to develop a novel interpretation of Carnap and Quine’s debate about ontology. Like recent revisionary accounts of the debate, it argues that the widespread perception of first-order disagreement between the two is misleading, ascribing this misperception to Carnap and Quine’s divergent usage of “ontology” and its cognates. Once this difference is accounted for, their seemingly contradictory claims about the subject can be reconciled, as the two “talk (...) past” each other on the semantic level. Crucially, however, this does not render their dispute merely verbal. Rather, it emerges as a remarkably consequential metalinguistic negotiation over whether the term “ontology” ought to be reinterpreted or replaced for the purposes of positive philosophical theorizing. This reading provides an account of the genuine disagreement that drove Carnap and Quine to engage in their debate and illuminates the broader metaphilosophical convictions that support each of their positions. As such, it addresses an important explanatory challenge facing members of the revisionary camp. (shrink)