Origins of Analytical Philosophy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 699 demands? They should read Robert Stern's "James and Bradley on Understanding," Philosophy 68 (1993). STEWART CANDLISH The University of Western Australia Michael Dummeit. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 199. Cloth, $32.5o. Dummett identifies analytical philosophy by its having taken the linguistic turn--by its conviction that thought is analyzable via the analysis of language, but only that way (4). He then argues that the turn, taken most decisively by Frege, leads to viable and sharply conceived analyses of thought, whereas Husserrs phenomenological method, not having taken it, could not. Alternative characterizations of analytical philosophy are certainly arguable; anyone thinking primarily of Russell, Carnap, and Quine will think of scientism (including mathematicization), and a commitment to realism, as being at least as able as Dummett's characterization to mark the right temporal and geographical boundaries. But the substantive issue is how to philosophize about thought; Dummett's omission of the definite article from the title is well considered. The happy conclusion has often been voiced of late that the affinities between Frege and Husserl are more remarkable than the differences. Dummett's strategy rather of identifying the linguistic turn as perhaps the seminal ingredient in the incipient divergence of the analytic and phenomenological schools around 19o3 is at least as illuminating (26, 193). Still, if Frege's linguistic turn led somewhere from which Husserrs failure to take it barred him, it is debatable whether they were ever trying to get to the same place, hence whether we should compare them by comparing their answers to common questions. In his great middle-period works, the founder of phenomenology set out to explain how it is that acts of consciousness--considered solipsistically , as actually lived through--can mean something, be object-directed. "How," Husserl asks in the Logical Investigations, "are we to understand the fact that the intrinsic being of objectivity becomes 'presented', 'apprehended' in knowledge, and so ends by being subjective?" (1:254). Frege's principal works do little to touch that sort of question, beyond an expression of wonder at the fact that there must be something going on in the minds of those who grasp thoughts. Nevertheless, Frege's aversion to such matters was auspicious, as perhaps no such project as Husserl's is viable; such indeed is intimated by Frege's context principle, the generalization of which is arguably the central strand of Wittgenstein's later philosophy , whereby understanding is incapable of being characterized mentalistically. Thus Dummett is able with great conciseness to show how Frege's focus upon language and strictly logical issues results in precisely demarcated roles for such concepts as sense and reference (39, 47-49, 53-56); whereas it is less clear what the analogues of these concepts in Husserl's thought are meant to do. More fundamentally, Husserl's strategy of analyzing thought leaves him unable to explain why language cannot plausibly be conceived as a mere vehicle for thoughts we can grasp independently (43-52, 67-68, 700 jOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER t995 131--35). As we should expect, Dummett's treatment of these and related matters is masterful. Chapters on Husserl and Frege on perception, and on something Dummett calls "Proto-Thoughts," exercise Dummett's peculiar gifts on new ground. The closing chapters bring us round to more familiar Dummettian themes: Since we must conceive of meaning as inextricably a feature of language, the fundamental task will be to describe the character of a theory of meaning for a language. Davidson's work in this direction is subjected to new and interesting criticisms, but for those who see holism as central to the Quine/Davidson outlook, some (but not all) of these criticisms may seem misplaced. Dummett declares that if what someone means is determined by the theory of meaning which implicitly informs their utterances, then "we need to be told by what means I can recognize the other speaker as having the same theory of meaning as I do," and charges Davidson with a commitment to privacy (147ff.). But if"Davidson's holism be emphasized , there is no corroboration of a theory of meaning except...