On Analytical Philosophy: Phy? There Is Printed An Appreciation by Professor David G. Stern of The

teorema
Vol. XXX/1, 2011, pp. 19-21

ISSN: 0210-1602
[BIBLID 0210-1602 (2011) 30:1; pp. 19-21]
On Analytical Philosophy
Michael Dummett
On the back of Hans-Johann Glock’s book What is Analytic Philoso-

phy?* there is printed an appreciation by Professor David G. Stern of the
University of Iowa. In the course of it he says that the book “provides a c1ear
– and to my mind, convincing – answer to the question it raises in its title”. I
envy Professor Stern: I could not find in Glock’s book any such answer. A
skilful verbal characterisation of baroque art or architecture, without illustra-
tions, should put the reader in a favourable position to make a good guess at
whether a painting or building which he is shown does or does not exemplify
that style. Similarly, a skilful verbal characterisation of analytic philosophy
should put the reader in a favourable position to make a good guess at
whether or not something that he reads is a product of that philosophical
school. It does not seem to me that Glock’s book confers on his readers that
capacity. At the beginning of his last chapter Glock summarises the preced-
ing chapter as arguing “that analytic philosophy is a historical tradition held
together by ties of influence on the one hand, family resemblances on the
other” [p. 231]. The idea of a family resemblance concept is Wittgenstein’s.
The application of such a concept is not determined by possession of some
single defining characteristic, but by resemblance to the archetype in one of
several different respects, as one member of a family may have the family
chin, another the family nose, and so on. Probably baroque art is such a con-
cept. Glock so classifies analytic philosophy because he doubts that it is to be
applied on the strength of a single defining characteristic. But when we look
at his penultimate chapter, we find that he spends much time in explaining
the notion of a family-resemblance concept, but says very little of what the
resemblances are between different examples of analytic philosophy and an
archetypal instance of it. And so no reader could learn to recognise that kind
of philosophical writing unless he was already familiar with some of the
specimens of it that Glock refers to.
On page 123 of his book Glock describes me as portraying analytic phi-

losophy as embodying the following four claims:
19
20 Michael Dummett
(1) The basic task of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of

thought.
(2) The structure of thought must be distinguished from the structure of

thinking.
(3) The only proper way of analysing the structure of thought is by ana-
lysing the structure of the linguistic expression of thought.
(4) The philosophy of language is therefore the foundation of philosophy.
Understood aright, this description is reasonably accurate. Philosophy does

not of course define itself as the analysis of the structure of thought, as biol-
ogy defines itself as the study of living organisms. As Glock acknowledges,
we begin to philosophise when we first wrestle with philosophical perplexi-
ties and paradoxes that strike us. Such philosophical puzzles are generated by
conceptual entanglements; it is only when we recognise their nature that we
see that, to resolve them, we need to analyse the structure of our thoughts.
Glock then turns to an examination of the four claims as characterising
analytical philosophy. He prefaces this examination with the following
judgement:
Dummett deserves credit not just for having reopened the debate about the na-
ture of analytical philosophy, but also for drawing attention to the important
role that the contrast between thought and language has played in its career.
Taken with a pinch of salt, moreover, his four claims can be portrayed as cen-
tral themes in early Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, Quine and Davidson.
Even if one takes into account the scope of the canvas on which Dummett
paints, however, his brush-strokes are inaccurate [p. 124].
Glock now seeks to justify his accusation, in the light of the four claims as
listed above.
Glock responds to (1) by granting “that thought is an important topic
in the philosophy of mind”, but asking, “Why should it be the topic of phi-
losophy as a whole?” [p. 124]. We have already seen the error of this reac-
tion. Glock is assuming that I suppose that philosophy defines itself as the
analysis of the structure of thought, but I do not; it is only when we come to
perceive the way in which philosophical problems are generated that we re-
alise that the resolution of any of them depends upon our grasping the
structure of thoughts in general. He opposes conceiving philosophy as ex-
plaining the nature of reality to conceiving it as explaining the character of
our thought about reality, and argues that founders of analytical philosophy
such as Russell and Moore were primarily concerned with the former. He
quotes Karen Green as saying that “what Dummett means by an account of
On Analytical Philosophy 21
thought is an account of the objects of our thoughts, or an account of the

world about which we think” [p. 129]. He accuses her of here trading on an
equivocation between the content of our thought and its object: when the
content of my thought is that Vesuvius is a volcano, the object of that
thought is just Vesuvius. “Only the object, not the content, is part of ‘the
world about which we think’”, Glock declares [Ibid.]. This criticism is sim-
ply silly. A comprehensive account of the world would not consist in a list
of all the objects there are in the world: reality is to be characterised by
everything true that holds good of it; the world is everything that is the
case. Glock writes, “According to (1), analysing thought is not a method for
achieving metaphysical insights into reality, it is the intrinsic goal of ana-
lytic philosophy” [Ibid.]. This elucidates what Glock means by philoso-
phy’s “basic task”, an ambiguous phrase; understood in this manner, claim
(1) is not one I have ever made or attributed to analytic philosophy. The
goal of all philosophy is the resolution of philosophical problems. I have
indeed contended that the theory of meaning is the foundation of the rest of
philosophy. What does this mean? It means that the theory of meaning is
prior to all other branches of the subject. Not that all philosophers must
cease work on other problems until they have constructed a plausible the-
ory of meaning, but that a philosophical theory or account can be correct
only if it is compatible with a sound theory of meaning. By that I still stand.
New College,
Holywell St.
Oxford, OX1 4AL, England, UK
NOTES
*
What is Analytical Philosophy?, Cambridge University Press, 2008, hardback
ISBN 978 O 521 87267 6, paperback ISBN 978 O 521 69426 1.

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teorema

Vol. XXX/1, 2011, pp. 19-21

On the back of Hans-Johann Glock’s book What is Analytic Philoso-

On page 123 of his book Glock describes me as portraying analytic phi-

(1) The basic task of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of

(2) The structure of thought must be distinguished from the structure of

(4) The philosophy of language is therefore the foundation of philosophy.

Understood aright, this description is reasonably accurate. Philosophy does

thought is an account of the objects of our thoughts, or an account of the

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