Recent Western Philosophy II: Wittgenstein, Ryle, Ayer, Quine, and Grice and Strawson

• Meaning and use: the Philosophical Investigations (1953, posthumous) rejects the idea that every word names an object. "For a large class of cases... the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (§43). Words are like tools in a toolbox, and language consists of many "language-games", activities such as giving orders, describing, reporting, joking, thanking, praying, each with its own rules.
• Family resemblance: there need be nothing common to all the things called "games"; they are linked by a network of overlapping similarities, as members of a family resemble one another (§66–67). The demand for a common essence behind every general word is one of the confusions philosophy must cure.
• Critique of private language (§243 onward): a private language, whose words refer to what only the speaker can know, his immediate private sensations, is impossible. If I write "S" in a diary whenever I have a certain sensation, there is no criterion of correctness: "whatever is going to seem right to me is right", and that only means we cannot talk about "right". The beetle-in-a-box example (§293) shows that a private object "drops out of consideration as irrelevant" to the meaning of a public word.
• Forms of life: "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life" (§19); what has to be accepted, the given, is forms of life (Part II). Language-games are embedded in shared human practices and agreements "not in opinions but in form of life" (§241), and justification comes to an end in what we do.
• Notion of philosophy: philosophical problems arise "when language goes on holiday" (§38); philosophy is "a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" (§109). It offers no theses and explains nothing; it "leaves everything as it is" (§124). Its aim is "to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle" (§309).

On Certainty (written in his last eighteen months, published 1969) responds to Moore's common-sense truisms and proof of an external world. Wittgenstein argues that Moore's propositions ("here is a hand", "the earth has existed for a long time") are not things he knows in the ordinary sense, since there is nothing that could count as evidence for them more certain than they are; rather they "stand fast" for us as the framework within which doubting and knowing make sense. "The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn" (§341). Doubt itself presupposes certainty.

Gilbert Ryle's "Systematically Misleading Expressions" (1932) argued that many sentences have a grammatical form that misrepresents the logical form of the facts they record, and that philosophy's task is to find the proper form. "Mr Pickwick is a fiction" looks like a statement about a person with a property, but it means that Dickens wrote a story that is not true of anyone; "unpunctuality is reprehensible" looks like a statement about an abstract entity but means that whoever is unpunctual deserves reproof. Such "quasi-ontological" and "quasi-Platonic" expressions breed false metaphysics.

The Concept of Mind (1949) attacks "the official doctrine" of Cartesian dualism, which Ryle calls "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine". It rests on a category mistake: presenting facts of one logical type as if they belonged to another. A visitor shown Oxford's colleges, libraries and laboratories who then asks "but where is the University?" makes such a mistake, as does a spectator who, after seeing every player, asks where the team spirit is. Mind is not a hidden thing alongside the body; mental terms describe how people behave and are disposed to behave. Ryle also distinguished knowing how, a practical capacity, from knowing that, and denied that intelligent practice always requires prior theorising.

A. J. Ayer's The Problem of Knowledge (1956) analyses knowing that p as having three conditions: that p is true, that one is sure that p, and that one has the right to be sure. It then treats philosophical scepticism as a pattern: the sceptic points to a gap between our evidence and what we claim (sense-experience and physical objects, behaviour and other minds, memory and the past), and the main replies, naive realism, reductionism, the scientific approach and descriptive analysis, each try to close or dissolve the gap. Ayer favoured descriptive analysis of how our claims are actually justified. Edmund Gettier's paper of 1963 used cases against exactly this kind of analysis, citing Ayer's formulation alongside Chisholm's.

W. V. O. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) attacks two assumptions of logical empiricism. The first is a sharp distinction between analytic truths, true by meaning alone, and synthetic truths, true by fact. Quine argues that every attempt to explain analyticity goes in a circle: through synonymy ("bachelor" means "unmarried man"), definition, interchangeability salva veritate, or Carnap's semantic rules, each of which presupposes the notion to be explained. The second dogma is reductionism, the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some construction out of terms referring to immediate experience and can be confirmed or refuted in isolation.

In place of both, Quine offers holism: "our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body". Our knowledge is a "man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges"; a conflict with experience can be met by revising any part, and "no statement is immune to revision", not even logic. The difference between the analytic and the synthetic becomes one of degree: how central a statement is to the web. Physical objects are "cultural posits", epistemologically comparable to Homer's gods though better as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson's "In Defense of a Dogma" (1956) replies that the analytic-synthetic distinction is in established philosophical and ordinary use, that speakers apply it with broad agreement to new cases, and that a distinction can exist even if no one has yet given a satisfactory philosophical explanation of it. Quine's standard of clarification is so strict that, applied consistently, it would also condemn the notions of synonymy and meaning, and so the whole idea that sentences mean anything, which is absurd. They also argue that holism about confirmation is compatible with keeping a distinction between statements we would revise and statements whose revision would amount to a change of meaning.