The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (83 page)

12
Two fine examples of this are provided by his two late works (Quine (
1992
) and (
1995a
)), each of which is only about a hundred pages long and in each of which we find a meticulously wrought compendium of all his main ideas.

13
This is the passage to which I referred parenthetically in the Introduction, n. 17. See also
Parts of Classes
, p. 57, where he says, ‘I am no enemy of systematic metaphysics,’ – and the ensuing ‘However’ is already audible.

14
Whether it is Humean or not, it is certainly profoundly anti-Hegelian: see
Ch. 7
, §§3 and 4.

15
Do these definitions bypass the contradiction that afflicted Frege’s conception of a set (
Ch. 8
, §7(a))? Arguably they do: see Hallett (
1984
) or, for something more sketchy, Moore (
2001a
),
Ch. 8
, §§5 and 6.

16
Compare Quine’s discussion of ordered pairs (
Ch. 12
, §7) with Lewis’ discussion of the null set in
Parts of Classes
, §1.4.

17
Cf. the parenthetical remark in n. 44 of the previous chapter for how this bears on Lewis’ answers to the Transcendence Question and the Creativity Question which I posed in §6 of the Introduction.

18
Real worlds, not what Lewis would call ‘
ersatz
worlds’; not, that is, mere abstract representations of how the actual world might have been. See further below and see
Plurality
,
Ch. 3
.

19
This too bears on Lewis’ answer to the Transcendence Question (n. 17), but more straightforwardly so. This is because other possible worlds, of which Lewis thinks that we metaphysicians can make perfectly good sense, are in several senses of the term transcendent.

20
But note that Lewis would not count what Quine calls possible worlds as the real thing. He would count them as
ersatz
worlds: see n. 18 above and see
Plurality
, §3.2.

21
In the previous chapter I put this in terms of his wanting to acknowledge, not only as few things as possible, but as few
sorts
of things as possible. Lewis adverts to this distinction and urges that modal realism, insofar as it is ontologically extravagant, is ontologically extravagant only in the first and less problematical of these respects: see
Counterfactuals
, p. 87. For current purposes this distinction does not matter; but for a rejoinder, see Melia (
2003
), pp. 113–114.

22
Cf.
Plurality
, pp. 3–5, and ‘Abstract’. See also Nolan (
2005
), pp. 203–204.

23
See esp.
Plurality
, §§1.2–1.5. John Perry has remarked that Lewis’ modal apparatus ‘goes through philosophical problems the way a McCormick reaper goes through wheat’ (quoted in van Inwagen (
1998
), p. 592).

24
See Melia (
2003
), pp. 111–113.

25
‘In a way in which’ does crucial work here: obviously there
are
ways in which the reasonableness of what I do can be sensitive to what gratuitous suffering I might have inflicted, for example insofar as that in turn is relevant to alternatives between which I had to choose. For more on these matters, see also
Plurality
, §§2.5 and 2.7.

26
This is not to deny that he produces some deep and fascinating mathematics in the process: see esp.
Parts of Classes
,
Ch. 4
and the Appendix, written jointly with John P. Burgess and A.P. Hazen.

27
For a striking alternative, see Papineau (
2009
).

28
Williams applies the phrase to philosophy as a whole, but I think he would be happy to apply it specifically to metaphysics too: see Williams (
2006l
).

29
It is worth emphasizing in this connection that naturalistic metaphysics by no means exhausts contemporary analytic metaphysics. For examples of the latter that are not examples of the former, see Nagel (
1986
); McDowell (
1996
); Cockburn (
1997
); and Cooper (
2002
).

30
This did not prevent Quine himself from trying to make sense of making sense of things. In subsequent naturalistic metaphysics there has been little even by way of an
attempt
to do so. At the limit is the view that we find in Churchland (
1979
), Stich (
1983
), and Churchland (
1986
), that notions such as that of belief are as scientifically discredited as that of phlogiston, and that there
is
no satisfactory sense ultimately to be made of them. In company such as this Lewis counts as moderate. He, like Quine, tries to make sense of making sense of things – and in fact produces some of his best work in the process. An outstanding essay, which is also as it happens another example of his application of the machinery of possible worlds, is ‘Attitudes’. Still, the essay seems to me fundamentally flawed, for the reasons to which I refer in the main text.

Chapter 14 Dummett The Logical Basis of Metaphysics

1. In Retrospect and in Prospect

This final chapter of
Part Two
brings it full circle, inasmuch as it directs our attention back to Frege. I do not mean to suggest that the subject of this chapter, Michael Dummett, is of importance to my narrative only to the extent that he is Fregean. The point is rather that Dummett himself wishes to direct our attention back to Frege. We have already seen (
Ch. 8
, §1) something of Dummett’s enormous admiration for Frege, to the exposition and dissemination of whose work he has made an unrivalled contribution,
¹
and whom he regards as having effected the revolution that made analytic philosophy possible.
²
Dummett is convinced that we need to reassimilate the
insights that were integral to this revolution before there can be any serious prospect of progress in metaphysics.

Michael Dummett (born 1925
³
) holds philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular, to be at root the analysis of thought; and he holds the analysis of thought to be at root the analysis of the means by which thought is expressed, which is to say language. This makes ‘the philosophy of language … the foundation of all other philosophy’ (‘Analytical Philosophy’, p. 442; cf. p. 458).
⁴
Dummett takes that to be one of the principal lessons to be learned from Frege. And he takes it to be the fundamental tenet of analytic philosophy.
⁵

Let us reflect on how this tenet relates specifically to metaphysics. In Dummett’s view, metaphysical questions are questions about the most general character of reality. They are questions about what, in general, it
takes
for things to be the way they are.
⁶
That is, they are questions about what, in general, it takes for things to be the way we
think
they are, when what we think is true. For Dummett, then, the most general attempt to make sense of things is an attempt to make sense of the sense, in general, that we make of things, insofar as we make correct sense of them. But there is no access to that sense save through the means by which we express it, namely language; such is the lesson of Frege. So the most general attempt to make sense of things is an attempt to make sense of
linguistic
sense, where this embraces all our thought and all that constitutes our thought.
⁷

Very well; but how well has analytic philosophy born witness to Dummett’s conception of these matters? Certainly, Frege’s own attention to linguistic sense has had an indelible impact on subsequent analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, little of what we have observed since has exhibited the smooth application of Frege’s ideas to the addressing of traditional metaphysical questions which Dummett’s conception suggests it could and should have done. On the contrary, attempts to make sense of linguistic sense, on the one hand, and attempts to make linguistic sense in response to traditional metaphysical questions, on the other, have tended to militate against each other, with now the former prevailing, now the latter.
⁸

This was certainly true in the case of Wittgenstein, both early and late. Here it was the former that prevailed. The making of linguistic sense was perceived as an activity to be
protected
, and to be protected, moreover, against attempts to address traditional metaphysical questions. Traditional metaphysical questions were perceived as nothing but morasses of confusion, wrecking the making of linguistic sense and nourishing the production of nonsense. The same was true in the case of the logical positivists. There too the former prevailed. In Quine, his positivist pedigree notwithstanding, there was a shift in favour of the latter. Quine showed a readiness to reengage with traditional metaphysical questions, but only as facilitated by an
un
readiness to reflect on linguistic sense, which, at least in its Fregean guise, he went as far as repudiating. Similarly in the case of subsequent naturalistic philosophers. Here the unreadiness, which has often been as much a lack of due equipment as a lack of due willing, has been an unreadiness to reflect on sense-making more generally, so that it has become virtually impossible for these philosophers to see how the metaphysical questions that they are addressing connect with broader humanistic concerns; how they manage to be the big questions that they have always affected to be (see
Ch. 13
, §4).

Dummett finds all of this intolerable. ‘The layman,’ he writes,

… expects philosophers to answer deep questions of great import for an understanding of the world. Do we have free will? Can the soul … exist apart from the body? … Is there a God?
⁹
And the layman is quite right: if philosophy does not aim at answering such questions, it is worth nothing. (
Logical Basis
, p. 1)

The time has therefore come, in Dummett’s view, to overcome the opposition between these two enterprises: to master the unsettling effects of reflection on linguistic sense and to put it to work in tackling those big questions, just as Frege put it to work in tackling fundamental questions in the philosophy of mathematics.

This will entail significant departures from all of the protagonists who have appeared so far in
Part Two
. Thus:

• unlike both Wittgenstein and Quine we shall need to take seriously the possibility of a systematic theory of linguistic
sense
^10
,
11

•
unlike Carnap and other logical positivists we shall need to take seriously the possibility of contributions to the exercise of making sense of things that consist neither in conceptual analysis nor in empirical investigation
¹²

• unlike Lewis and other naturalistic philosophers of his ilk we shall need to pay proper attention not just to sense, still less just to linguistic sense, but to the making of sense
¹³

and indeed

• unlike naturalistic philosophers more generally we shall need to eschew naturalism.
¹⁴

I said ‘significant departures from all of the protagonists who have appeared so far in
Part Two
.’
All
of them? Even Frege? Even Frege. We shall consider Dummett’s most significant departure from Frege in the next section. But as a foretaste I note that Dummett is among those who take Frege to accord an unreasonable degree of objectivity to linguistic sense (see
Ch. 8
, §6).
¹⁵
Dummett thinks that Frege spoils his own insights about the relations between linguistic sense and language itself. He thinks that, by casting linguistic sense as something that is completely independent of language, and indeed of us, Frege thwarts a satisfactory account of how such sense is grasped and conveyed in acts of linguistic communication, and of how our grasp of it furnishes us with knowledge of the
Bedeutungen
of linguistic expressions. We shall see in the next section how this relates to his fundamental departure from Frege.

The programme, then, is first to clear the way for a systematic theory of linguistic sense by reflecting on what such a theory must look like,
¹⁶
and then, in the light of this reflection, to address the metaphysical questions that analytic philosophers hitherto have tended either to shun or to tackle
with inadequate tools. A crucial part of the programme will be to reflect on the character of
truth
. This is not just because the concept of linguistic sense and the concept of truth are correlative and need to be explained together (see e.g.
Truth and the Past
, p. 107, and ‘McDowell’, pp. 372–373). It is also because, as indicated earlier, the connection between making maximally general sense of things and making sense of making linguistic sense is forged by reflecting on the contents of
true
thoughts. Here is how Dummett himself puts the matter, quoting the famous second sentence of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus
(Wittgenstein (
1961
), 1.1):