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The Analytic Turn in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy

Michael Beaney

Table of Contents

[Introduction] 4

1- Frege and Russell: Decompositional and Transformative Analysis 11

2- Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers: Connective and Explicatory Analysis 19

3- Bolzano and Husserl: Semantic, Conceptual and Phenomenological Analysis 24

4- Conclusion: The Varieties of Analysis 28

References 30

Notes 34

Ever since I abandoned the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, I have sought solutions of philosophical problems by means of analysis, and I remain firmly persuaded, in spite of some modern tendencies to the contrary, that only by analysing is progress possible.

(Russell, My Philosophical Development , ch. 1)

[Introduction]

One of the most important developments in twentieth-century philosophy - arguably,the most important development, at least in the English-speaking world - was the rise of analytic philosophy. There has been increasing debate in recent years over what exactly ‘analytic philosophy’ means, as the term has been used in a wider and wider sense and it has become harder and harder to identify any common assumptions, methods or themes. But there is general agreement on its main sources: the work of Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), G. E. Moore (1873-1958) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) in the period from roughly 1880 to 1920. (Frege’s first book,Begriffsschrift , setting out his new logic, was published in 1879; and Wittgenstein’sTractatus was published in 1921.) More specifically, the origins of analytic philosophy are often dated to the rebellion by Russell and Moore against British idealism at the turn of the twentieth century. But there is little doubt that as Russell’s and Moore’s ideas were developed - in particular, as Russell became convinced that mathematics was really logic, and through Wittgenstein’s early work - Frege’s writings became increasingly influential. In theTractatus , Wittgenstein critically engages with Frege’s and Russell’s ideas above all else, with the result that both Frege and Wittgenstein have taken their place alongside Russell and Moore as the acknowledged founders of the analytic tradition.

Central to Russell’s and Moore’s rebellion against idealism was the emphasis placed on analysis, as the remark cited above from Russell’sMy Philosophical Development indicates. But both Russell and Moore were notoriously unclear as to what exactly ‘analysis’ meant, and they use the term in a number of ways throughout their writings. At the time of their rebellion, however, thedecompositional conception was undoubtedly dominant: analysis was understood as the process of decomposing something into its constituent parts. This conception is explicit in Moore’s 1899 paper, ‘The Nature of Judgment’. On the naïve realist view advocated in this paper, the world is composed of ‘concepts’, which are synthesized into propositions, both concepts and propositions being independent of us. Analysis is then accorded a fundamental role in Moore’s epistemology: “A thing becomes intelligible first when it is analysed into its constituent concepts” (1899, p. 8).

Both Moore’s naïve realism and the associated decompositional conception of analysis were endorsed by Russell in his initial rejection of idealism, but such a view faces obvious problems. How can we give an account of propositions about non-existent objects, for example? Much of Russell’s subsequent philosophy is an attempt to think through and find solutions to such problems - the problems raised by adopting a decompositional conception of analysis in the context of repudiating idealism.[1] After the initial exuberance of his naïve realism, Russell gradually developed tools to cut back on his ontological commitments. This led first to his theory of denoting concepts, which was replaced within a few years by his theory of descriptions, on the basis of which he then developed his full-blown philosophy of logical atomism. By this time Wittgenstein, too, having been Russell’s pupil, was developing his own form of logical atomism, which found its definitive statement in theTractatus .

How can this path to logical atomism, however, be thought to have given rise to a whole new tradition of philosophy? Naïve realism is hardly new, and even logical atomism has its precursors in the work of Leibniz, in particular. In any case, neither naïve realism nor logical atomism can be regarded as characteristic of analytic philosophy after the 1920s. More specifically, the decompositional conception of analysis which seems to lie at the heart of Moore’s, Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s early work is far from new. In its general form, such a conception played a key role in Descartes’ philosophy (inspired by his analytic geometry) and in Locke’s empiricism, to take just two examples from the early modern period, and in the particular case of concepts, found its classic statement in Kant’s account of analyticity.[2] So if decompositional analysis is meant to characterize analytic philosophy, then why has analytic philosophy been thought to start with Russell and Moore?

The answer is that it is not decompositional analysis on its own that characterizes analytic philosophy, even during its logical atomist phase. In my view, the single most significant event in the development of analytic philosophy was not Russell’s and Moore’s rebellion against idealism, but the appearance in 1905 of Russell’s theory of descriptions. Frank Ramsey rightly described this theory as a ‘paradigm of philosophy’ (1931, p. 263), a view that was endorsed by Moore (1959, p. 151). What is crucial about the theory of descriptions is that it introduced a quite different conception of analysis, which might be characterized as atransformative orexplicatory conception. Fundamental to the theory is therephrasing of the sentence to be analyzed, a sentence of the form ‘TheF isG ’, where ‘TheF ’ represents the definite description, into a sentence of a quite different form. To take Russell’s classic example, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is analyzed as ‘There is one and only one King of France, and whatever is King of France is bald’. There is nothing decompositional about this type of analysis. ‘The present King of France is bald’ is not being analyzed into ‘The present King of France’ and ‘is bald’, for example. The definite description is ‘analyzed away’: no such phrase appears in the analyzed sentence.

Again, though, the idea of transformative analysis itself was not new. It can be found in medieval logic, for example, and arguably goes back to Aristotle’s logic and ancient Greek geometry (which is the original source of talk of ‘analysis’). Indeed, in some sense, transformation is involved in all types of analysis.[3] A good example of the idea in its pure form can be found in the conception of paraphrasis articulated by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). In hisEssay on Logic (published posthumously, in 1843), Bentham wrote: “By the word paraphrasis may be designated that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity” (1843, p. 246). Bentham applied the method in ‘analyzing away’ talk of ‘obligations’ (cf. 1843, p. 247), and the similarities between Bentham’s method and Russell’s theory of descriptions have been discussed, most notably, by John Wisdom (1904-93) in a book devoted to just this relationship published in 1931.[4]

In its distinctive modern form, however, transformative analysis originated with Frege, which is why Frege has also come to be seen as one of the founders of analytic philosophy. The central project of Frege’s life was to demonstrate that arithmetic is reducible to logic, and in pursuing this he both invented modern quantificational logic, which made the project feasible, and provided analyses of number statements. On his account, a number statement such as ‘Jupiter has four moons’ is analyzed as ‘The conceptmoon of Jupiter has four instances’ (cf. 1884, §§ 46, 54).[5] That is, it is viewed not as predicating of Jupiter the property of having four moons, as a simple decompositional analysis might suggest, but as predicating of the (first-level) conceptmoon of Jupiter the (second-level) propertyhas four instances , which can be logically defined in Frege’s theory. To make clear that number statements can be logically defined, in other words, Frege had to transform the statements to show what was ‘really’ involved.

What distinguishes Frege’s and Russell’s use of transformative analysis from earlier uses? Here what is crucial is the role played by quantificational logic, which Frege invented and which Russell further developed and applied. Quantificational logic offered a far more powerful means of representing propositions and inferences than had hitherto been available, but only worked by assuming that ordinary language sentences could indeed be radically transformed in formalizing them. The radical nature of these transformations and the use to which they were put in Frege’s and Russell’s logicist projects inevitably opened up semantic, epistemological and metaphysical questions. What is the relationship between ordinary language and formal logic? What governs the ‘correctness’ of a logical formalization? Clearly, not everything is preserved in such transformations, so whatis preserved and what can be allowed to vary? If we make use of notions such as ‘content’, ‘sense’, ‘meaning’, ‘denotation’ or ‘reference’ in justifying the analyses, then how are these notions to be explained and what are their relationships? To what extent are our analyses answerable to the world itself? Can we say anything a priori about what the world must be like, and if so what? What is the relationship between language and thought? How do they represent or engage with the world? These and many other such questions have provided the dynamic of the analytic movement ever since the work of Frege and Russell.

Of course, many of these questions have been asked before in different forms, but what made such questions pressing was the need to justify the new logic, and what arose, as a result, was far greater self-consciousness about our use of language and its potential for leading us astray. This greater self-consciousness has prompted talk of a ‘linguistic turn’ having occurred in twentieth-century philosophy, a turn that was arguably first made in Wittgenstein’sTractatus , drawing on Frege’s and Russell’s ideas. But underlying this linguistic turn was the analytic turn instigated by Frege’s and Russell’s use of transformative analysis in developing and applying quantificational logic. It is the philosophical questions that this raised that have given shape to the analytic tradition.

But where does this leave decompositional analysis with which analytic philosophy seemed to begin? The relationship between decompositional and transformative analysis is one of the key issues addressed in this volume - in particular, in Part One. But the short answer, as far as Russell is concerned (brought out in the papers by Griffin and Hylton), is that transformative analysis was introduced toreinforce his appeal to decompositional analysis, which he continued to assume was required at the ultimate level of analysis. For the aim of transformation was to reveal the ‘real’ logical form of the proposition to be analyzed, the constituents of the fully analyzed sentence being assumed to correspond to, and be structured in exactly the same way as, the ultimate simple constituents of the reality represented. As far as Frege is concerned, the issue is more complicated, since Frege did not share Russell’s fundamental assumption that every propositional content can be uniquely analyzed into ultimate simple constituents. For Frege, function-argument analysis (as utilized in transformative logical analysis) played a far greater overt role than whole-part (decompositional) analysis, although (arguably) he still made tacit appeal to the latter in the ontological conclusions he drew. (For discussion of the differences between Frege’s and Russell’s conceptions of analysis, see the papers by Reck, Levine and Beaney.)

Although Russell does not seem to have recognized the distinction between transformative and decompositional analysis, at least explicitly, the distinction (or something like it) did come to be drawn by the members of the so-called ‘Cambridge School of Analysis’ in the late 1920s and early 1930s - in the second phase of analytic philosophy (to endorse the division suggested by Hacker in his paper; see p. [2] below). In their terminology, there was a difference between ‘logical’ or ‘same-level’ analysis, which simply transformed one sentence into another, and ‘philosophical’ or ‘metaphysical’ or ‘reductive’ or ‘directional’ or ‘new-level’ analysis, which revealed the underlying ontological commitments. (The distinction can also be seen as implicit in Wittgenstein’sTractatus , as the papers by Hanna and Phillips indicate.) There was a great deal of debate in this period about the nature and role of analysis, the main result of which was growing criticism of the reductive conception.[6] But with the distinction in place, it was possible to accept this criticism without rejecting analysis altogether. Same-level analysis could be endorsed without metaphysical reductionism, and this became the hallmark of the phase (or phases) of analytic philosophy that followed.

The move away from reductive conceptions of analysis and the development of alternative conceptions can be found, for example, in the work of the Vienna Circle during the 1920s and 1930s (in the third phase of analytic philosophy distinguished by Hacker). The most significant figure in this regard was Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), whose first major work,Der logische Aufbau der Welt , was published in 1928. TheAufbau opens with endorsement of what Russell called in 1914 ‘the supreme maxim in scientific philosophizing’: “Wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities” (1917, p. 115). This has often been interpreted as recommending a programme of ontological eliminativism, as suggested by the theory of descriptions, but Carnap interprets it epistemologically, as permitting what he calls ‘rational reconstruction’. (Russell’s own understanding of logical construction is discussed in the papers by Hylton and Linsky.) As Carnap characterizes it in the preface to the second edition of theAufbau , rational reconstruction is “the searching out of new definitions for old concepts”, where the new definitions “should be superior to the old in clarity and exactness, and, above all, should fit into a systematic structure of concepts” (1961, p. v). As he goes on to note, such clarification of concepts is what he later called ‘explication’; and the idea of explication is one of the themes explored in this volume, beginning with the paper by Reck.[7]

Carnap’s programme of explication provides one example of the transition to less reductive conceptions of analysis. But undoubtedly the most striking and important example is Wittgenstein’s later work, in which he explicitly repudiates his earlier logical atomism, and develops a new view of philosophy as conceptual clarification. Wittgenstein’s early and later thought is discussed in three of the papers in Part Two of this volume, by Hacker, Hanna and Phillips. Wittgenstein’s ideas were enormously influential, not only in Cambridge, among his various pupils and colleagues, but also in Oxford in the two decades or so after the Second World War (in the fourth phase of analytic philosophy distinguished by Hacker), when related methodologies were used by Gilbert Ryle (1900-76), J. L. Austin (1911-60) and Peter Strawson (1919-2006), to name three of the most dominant figures. Strawson has talked of ‘connective’ analysis replacing reductive analysis (1992, ch. 1), and this is an apt way to encapsulate the transition. But connective analysis was not only a feature of British philosophy. As Baldwin shows in his paper, a connective conception can also be found prior to the Second World War in the work of C. I. Lewis (1883-1964), the most important American analytic philosopher of the period. The development of connective forms of analysis provides the main theme of the papers in Part Two.

I suggested above that the single most significant event in the development of analytic philosophy was the appearance of the theory of descriptions in 1905. But 1905 also witnessed the introduction by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) of the idea of ‘phenomenological reduction’,[8] which was a key moment - perhapsthe key moment - in the development of phenomenology. The analytic and phenomenological traditions have often been seen as rivals in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, but in recent years, the common origins of the two traditions and their philosophical connections have been stressed.[9] One important influence on Husserl, for example, was Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848), whose work anticipates many ideas in later analytic philosophy. Bolzano’s conception of analysis is discussed by Lapointe in the first paper of Part Three.

Just as much as Frege and Russell, Husserl’s philosophy grew out of an interest in the foundations of mathematics, and he became deeply concerned to combat psychologism. From his earliest work onwards, his aim was to uncover the sources of our meaning-constituting acts, initially in mathematics and logic, later more generally. (Husserl’s early development is explained in the paper by Moran.) Indeed, we can also see an analytic turn as having taken place in giving rise to phenomenology. As in the case of analytic philosophy, this had many aspects. In my own work on conceptions of analysis in the history of philosophy, I have distinguished three main modes of analysis - the regressive, the decompositional and the transformative (see §1 of my paper below). The decompositional and transformative modes have already been introduced. But the regressive mode, understood as the process of identifying the principles, premises, causes, etc., by means of which something can be derived or explained, was arguably dominant in conceptions of analysis up until the early modern period, and regressive conceptions have been prevalent ever since (even if overshadowed by decompositional conceptions).[10] Frege’s and Russell’s concern to reveal the logical source of our knowledge of arithmetic, encapsulated in logical laws and definitions, can be seen as illustrating the conception, and Russell alluded to the conception himself in the title of a paper written in 1907, ‘The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics’. The regressive conception is also a feature of Husserl’s methodology. We can see it reflected in Husserl’s remark in theCrisis that he uses the key word ‘transcendental’ “in the broadest sense for the original motif … which through Descartes confers meaning on all modern philosophies … the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge” (1936, §26).

As Husserl’s use of the term ‘transcendental’ suggests, though, there is a Kantian dimension to Husserl’s project, and the remark itself indicates a Cartesian motivation as well. So what was new in Husserl’s analytic turn? What Husserl himself identified as crucial was his ‘discovery’ in 1905 of the method of reduction (later elaborated into a number of procedures), by which all our various everyday, psychological and scientific assumptions are ‘bracketed’ in order to focus on the underlying concepts and structures of our cognitive acts.[11] Phenomenology became the task of “clarifying the essence of cognition and of being an object of cognition”, as he put it inThe Idea of Phenomenology (1964, p. 18).

It is not just the coincidence of date that prompts the comparison with Russell here. For, as I suggest in my own paper, just as Russell was concerned to identify the indefinables of philosophical logic, as he described it in thePrinciples (quoted on p. [15] below), to be apprehended by ‘acquaintance’, so too Husserl was concerned to isolate through phenomenological reduction the ‘essences’ that underlie our logical thinking, to be apprehended by ‘essential intuition’ (‘Wesenserschauung ’). Furthermore, as Haaparanta brings out in her paper, there are also elements of ‘transformation’ in phenomenological reduction, which raise philosophical issues, and the paradox of analysis, in particular, which equally affect the kind of transformative analysis exemplified by the theory of descriptions.

Insofar as grasping ‘essences’ amounts to “fixing concepts in intuition”, as Moran characterizes phenomenological analysis (see p. [19] below), Husserl’s project can also be seen as one of conceptual clarification. This is discussed, in complementary ways, by Moran and Thomasson in their papers. Moran elucidates the ‘transcendental subjective’ aspects of Husserl’s methodology, while Thomasson compares phenomenology with ordinary language philosophy. Appreciating the similarities and differences between phenomenological analysis and forms of analysis in analytic philosophy sheds much light on both. Certainly, comparison demonstrates just how subtle and intricate are the relationships between the various conceptions of analysis that can be found in the two traditions, conceptions that themselves have roots in earlier conceptions. The nature of phenomenological analysis and its relationship to other conceptions of analysis form the central theme of the papers in Part Three.

Even in a book devoted to the topic of analysis, with fourteen contributors writing from a variety of perspectives, it is not possible to do justice to the full range of conceptions of analysis in twentieth-century philosophy. This volume focuses on certain key figures in early analytic philosophy and phenomenology, in the period prior to the Second World War. But both earlier and later conceptions are also discussed, since these help place the developments in this period in context. In the rest of this introduction I will say a little more about each of the papers in turn, highlighting their significance in the overall picture that I have all too briefly sketched in these first few pages. I draw some conclusions in the final section.