Table Of ContentPROFESSIONAL PHiLOSOPHY
A PALLAS PAPERBACK
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THOMAS D. PERRY
PROFESSIONAL
PHILOSOPHY
What It Is and Why It Matters
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER/TOKYO
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perry, Thomas D.
Professional philosophy.
Bibliography: p.
Includes indexes.
I. Philosophy. 2. Ethics. I. Title.
B72.P38 1986 190:9'04 85-25684
ISBN-I 3:978-90-277 -2072-6 e-ISBN -13 :978-94-009-4532-6
DOl: I 0.1 007/978-94-009-4532-6
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada
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190 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A.
In all other countries, sold and distributed
by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group,
P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland.
Also published in 1986 in hardbound edition by Reidel
All Rights Reserved
© 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION IX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xvii
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1 / FOUR STAGES OF REFLECTION 3
1. Metaphysical Problems and Theories 4
2. The Four Stages Described 7
3. The Four Stages Illustrated 11
4. A Change of Emphasis 17
CHAPTER 2/ DEFENDING COMMON SENSE 21
5. Moore on Common Sense 21
6. Moore and Later Philosophy 26
7. Private Language 29
8. A Critique and a Promissory Note 34
CHAPTER 3 / DESCRIPTIVE METAPHYSICS 37
9. Identification 37
10. Re-Identification 40
11. A Skeptical Counterattack 45
12. A Final Paradox 49
CHAPTER 4 / CONCEPTUAL REFORM 54
13. Time Gaps 55
14. A Prefabricated Philosophy Problem 59
15. The Theory of Stage Four 63
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART TWO
CHAPTER 5 / METAPHYSICS OUT OF LOGIC 69
16. Introduction to Part Two 69
17. Russell on Descriptions 75
18. Russell's Atomism 80
CHAPTER 6 / INSIDE THE lffiVOLUTION 88
19. Some Early Wittgenstein 88
20. The Decline of "Analysis" 94
21. Critique of the Tractatus 96
22. Straws on on Reference 104
CHAPTER 7/ A PASSAGE TO AMERICA 109
23. The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction 110
24. Time Gaps Revisited 113
25. Canonical Language 118
CHAPTER 8 / RECENT PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 124
26. Proper Names 125
27. Necessary Identity Statements 129
28. Mind-Brain Identity 133
29. Retrospect 138
PART THREE
CHAPTER 9 / VALUES IN GENERAL 145
30. Introduction to Part Three 145
31. Standards 147
32. True Values 150
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
CHAPTER 10 / ETHICAL THEORY 155
33. The Problem of Moral Truth 155
34. Two Types of Moral Thought 157
35. Reforming the Concept of Moral Truth 163
36. The Economy of this Reform 169
CHAPTER II/APPLIED ETHICS 176
37. A Problem of Privacy 178
38. Some Descriptive Inquiries 180
39. Constructing the Right 184
40. The Metaphysics of Politics 189
CONCLUSION 193
NOTES 205
BIBLIOGRAPHY 226
NAME INDEX 231
SUBJECT INDEX 234
INTRODUCTION
Over the past several decades serious work in philosophy has become
almost wholly inaccessible to people who do not specialize in the subject.
To be sure, the writings of Aristotle and Kant were never easy reading,
and even relatively untechnical philosophers like Mill or Santayana de
mand careful study if we are really to understand them. But during the
last generation or two the situation has steadily become worse for
readers who may want to know what philosophers of their own time are
doing. And this is true even though many writers have been learning to
avoid the unnecessary jargon that disfigures so much of traditional
philosophy. No matter how direct the English style of recent
philosophers may be, their methodic purposes and argument style will re
main obscure to anyone who has not gone to considerable trouble to be
introduced to them. Then too, the closeness of their analysis and the con
sequent narrowness of many of the issues pursued make it hard to catch
onto the argument without some familiarity with slightly earlier discus
sions from which those issues emerged. All of this helps to account for
the rather common but false belief that professional philosophy is now
only a collection of technical exercises that could hardly be of interest to
anyone but the philosophers themselves.
New general introductions have of course continued to appear, but
these texts and anthologies must stay pretty close to the broadest tradi
tional issues, and they often restrict themselves to a very elementary
treatment. While several interesting articles on recent philosophy have
been published in general journals of good quality, most notably in the
New York Review of Books, they usually have concentrated on a single
thinker. And with one or two notable exceptions like Searle's article on
Chomsky, they do not give sustained illustrations to help us think our
way through some of the philosopher's problems and reasoning. We are
commonly left with only a sketchy acquaintance with his intellectual style
and major claims; or else, hoping to distill much thought in limited
space, the writers of such articles often lapse into a specialist idiom which
ix
x INTRODUCTION
itself can provide no more than a sketch to those who are not at home
with it. In any case, it is doubtful that even a lengthy discussion of but
one or two thinkers, however eminent, could adequately present that
larger development of recent philosophy without which it cannot be well
understood. I refer to its methodic origins in, and metamorphosis from,
traditional Western thought, and also to the major transformations
which have occurred within recent analytic philosophy itself. Even the
excellent introductions to subfields of philosophy presented in the Ox
ford and Prentice-Hall series do not usually fill this need. Finally, the two
good book-length accounts of these changes that I know of - Urmson's
Philosophical Analysis and Warnock's Philosophy since 1900 - end
with the nineteen-fifties and provide more in the way of historical survey
than detailed illustration, at least in the case of Warnock's book which
is much the shorter of the two. I say all this not by way of criticism but
in justification of the present book and the special form which it has
taken.
Part One begins by outlining some of the main assumptions and
methods of traditional epistemology with which many readers will
already be broadly familiar. An illustration from Berkeley is used for this
purpose in Chapter 1. Chapters 2 and 3 then illustrate the crucial change
in emphasis among the older methods which eventually led to the domi
nant outlook of mid-20th-century philosophy. This is done by examining
three influential arguments published by G. E. Moore, Ludwig Witt
genstein, and P. F. Straws on in 1925, 1953, and 1959 respectively. In
these illustrations we see how the project of solving metaphysical pro
blems, or of reconstructing common sense in default of such solutions,
gave way to the project of "dissolving" them by uncovering the confu
sions on which they allegedly rest. But already in Straws on the latter pro
ject has begun to serve another: that of describing and clarifying the
structures of thought more patiently and accurately than philosophers of
earlier centuries had normally done. This has proved to be the dominant
concern of professional philosophers in later decades, whether they have
been occupied with the most elementary and general structures of com
mon sense, as Strawson was in that argument, or with more specialized
concepts and thought patterns. But it is now more commonly recognized
than it was then that conceptual description can sometimes disclose the
need for conceptual reform - not reform in the oldest and most fun-
INTRODUCTION xi
damental schemes of thought, perhaps, but in the more recent structures
of common sense and (as everyone agrees) in the concepts of science.
Chapter 4 illustrates a theory of conceptual change and reform which is
designed to avoid the excesses of metaphysical reconstruction and other
wise accommodate the insights of the new philosophy. This illustration
builds on the work of several recent philosophers concerning a particular
metaphysical puzzle arising from the growth of scientific knowledge. It
is put to further use in Parts Two and Three.
A major theme running through most of Part One is the developing
influence of G. E. Moore, one of the three giants of analytic philosophy.
Bertrand Russell's influence is traced through much of Part Two. The
third giant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, has a major role to play in both of
these Parts.
After the first Part has contrasted the main assumptions and methods
of mid-century philosophy with those of earlier centuries, Part· Two
traces some major developments within analytic philosophy itself, begin
ning early in the century and continuing to the present day. In the first
illustration of Chapter 5 we consider one of Russell's most famous
arguments, his much-admired "theory of descriptions." We then show
how, in his lectures of 1918, he built a metaphysical theory upon that
argument, a theory which hopes to avoid the sins of traditional specula
tion by using the methods of modern logic and the results of science. His
resulting "ontology" or theory of ultimately real things which language
must take account of in describing the world, served to justify the
method of analysis which many admirers of Russell pursued during the
nineteen-twenties and early thirties. A partly similar theory of reality is
embedded in the classic work published by Wittgen~tein shortly after
World War I. Chapter 6 extracts one of the main arguments of the latter
theory and then illustrates Wittgenstein's own dissatisfaction with it dur
ing the thirties and forties. For the latter purpose we draw examples from
his second classic work, written mostly in the forties and published in
1953. The later Wittgenstein and other mid-century writers achieved a
more subtle and complex view of language which seemed to discredit the
whole program of exact analysis which had developed in Russell's wake,
a program that even Moore had embraced though without accepting the
metaphysical underpinnings which Russell and the early Wittgenstein
had provided for it. In the eyes of many, this program received its coup
