The Need for Interpretation: Contemporary Conceptions of the Philosopher’s Task 9781472556622, 9781472505620

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Preface The essays in this book originated in a nagging dissatisfaction with analytical philosophy as it has recently been practised in England and America. Each of the contributors has studied or taught in the faculty of philosophy at Oxford University, a bastion of the analytical movement if anything is. A shared antipathy towards the doctrines prevailing there is what first drew us together and led to the formation of a weekly discussion group. Among Oxford philosophers there are many such alliances, born of expediency, perhaps in our case, desperation, most of which are named for the day on which they meet. The name of our particular cell, The Friday Afternoon (and later on, Morning) Discussion Group, doubtless never sufficiently distinguished us from the innumerable conclaves of the less disaffected. What surely did set us apart was our suspicion that there was more to life than realism, antirealism, empiricism, or idealism. One quickly learns that induction into the world of professional philosophy is tantamount to being 'ismed' into stupefaction. We assume we are not unique in our discontent with the received alternatives in Anglo-American philosophy. What was notable about the Friday afternoon group, however, was that over the course of its three-year life we were unable to reach any consensus about just what analytical philosophy is. There seems to be no single characteristic that would identify it in the hands of those philosophers commonly acknowledged as its leading practitioners. Yet, even though we could not pin down analytical philosophy, we remained convinced that it left something to be desired. Furthermore, though we complained against the dogmas of the tradition, we were acutely aware that we wrote from within it and that our style of inquiry, even our prejudices, were informed (though not dominated) by the popular tendencies toward formalism and natural scientific empiricism.

In trod uction That current Anglo-American philosophy should lack an agreed conception of the philosopher's task is not, by historical standards, unusual. Nor need it be taken as an indicator of debility. To the contrary, much great philosophy was developed in the ferment of dispute with received conceptions of the discipline. What is open to criticism is not the lack of an agreed conception so much as the fact that such broad issues now receive so little reflection. There are several reasons for this. One has to do with a tendency, especially marked in America, to turn philosophy into a simulacrum of the natural sciences. Although it is unable to match them in their contribution to technical progress much recent philosophy has imitated the sciences' abstractness and formality - perhaps in the hope of sharing their prestige. In these circumstances general discussions of the scope and methods of philosophy are unwelcome, a distraction from 'scientific business'. British philosophers, on the other hand, have been less keen to borrow status from the sciences - perhaps, in Britain, there has been less of it to borrow. But nor have they shown any great inclination to raise general questions of approach. There is a fear that such discussions are inevitably insubstantial. The prevailing ethos is one of 'getting on with the job'. To British philosophers the reflexive preoccupations of continental philosophy appear narcissistic, redolent of that unhealthy self-absorption which the British have always distrusted in foreigners. This neglect of general questions of method is magnified by analytical philosophy's reluctance to situate itself historically; or, when it does so, to adopt a very selective view of philosophical history. In turning its attention to the past analytical philosophy has concentrated, for the most part, on its differences with British Empiricism and this has given its image of philosophical development an inap-

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The Role of Philosophy in the Human Sciences David Kirsh Introduction The sciences of man are about to enter a new stage of development. Fields such as Artificial Intelligence, cognitive psychology, cognitive sociology, ethnomethodology and sociobiology promise to transform our approach to the scientific study of man, mind and behaviour - to influence our questions, our research strategies, our methods and our long-range goals. Will philosophy have a role to play in this fundamental transformation? Should it? The thesis I shall defend is that philosophy does have a role to play in the human sciences. Man is the most complex system we know. His biological constitution is more complicated than any other known organism, his cognitive capacities exceed anything we have yet encountered or created, and his social interactions are so complicated that no theory has been suggested that might even begin to qualify as a general theory of human social behaviour. Moreover, because belief in theories affects the way people interpret and value the world, acceptance of certain social, political and psychological theories can actually lead to changes in behaviour. Widespread acceptance of a theory about the stock market would be likely to affect stock market behaviour. Similarly, acceptance of a theory about alienation, or about neurosis, may aggravate a person's perception of these phenomena and make him more neurotic and alienated than before. Theories in the human sciences interact with their subject matter to an extent unheard of in the natural sciences. And they frequently have normative effects as well. Consequently, theorists in the human sciences focus on a system (man and his culture) that is so complex that there is no shared view of goals and methods for them to appeal to in times of dispute and conflict. At these moments scientific argument

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Creation and Discovery: Wittgenstein on Conceptual Change Christopher M. Leich I

Throughout his later work on the philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein advances the surprising idea that the progress of mathematics involves continual conceptual change. Most often, he puts the idea in terms of mathematical proof: a new proof, he tells us, 'creates' a new concept (RFM 111/41) or 'determines' a new concept (RFM 111/31); it 'changes grammar' , and introduces a 'new criterion' (RF M 111/24).1 But it is very plausible to suppose that these claims about mathematical proof are the products of a more general view of mathematically necessary truth: the view that one can grasp a mathematically necessary truth (e.g. that 5+ 7= 12) for the first time only at the expense ofa change in one's concepts (of, e.g., 5, or 7, or addition). Wittgenstein links mathematical necessity with conceptual change explicitly: The mathematical Must is only another expression of the fact that mathematics forms concepts. (RFM V/46) This must shows that he has adopted a concept. (RFM VI/18) What is the transition I make from 'it will be like this' to 'it must be like this'? I form a different concept. (RFM 111/29) And these points are associated with the idea that if one is undecided about a certain mathematical claim, one does not understand the claim. Thus, in Wittgenstein's view no one now understands Fermat's (undecided) Last Theorem: If I am to know what a proposition like Fermat's last theorem says, must I not know what the criterion is, for the proposition to

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Post -structuralism, Empiricism and Interpretation Sollace Mitchell Incontestably there is today a rift between the English and Frenchspeaking traditions of philosophy. It is in some ways so profound that it makes translation from one philosophical language into the other look like the impossible ideal of some forgotten universalism. Imagine one of Donald Davidson's radical translators seated unobtrusively in Jacques Derrida's latest seminar, the post-structuralist vocabulary flying past him. 'Lapin' would be the least of his problems. Yet the two traditions do share a common interest: the question of how language bears on philosophy. Might they not, then, have something to say to one another? The enthusiasts for a reconciliation of the two schools suggest that their isolation is regrettable, that they would do better to foster more intimate contacts. Surely there is something to be said for lowering philosophical import duties. But, in the spirit of pluralism, I might point out that isolation leads to independent development, without which the issue of an exchange of ideas would have no compelling interest. If we do have something to learn from the French, or they from us, it is precisely because we have for so long gone our separate ways. With this in mind, I propose to pinpoint the essential differences between the two traditions, which I shall broadly call analytical and post-structuralist. Both these categories subsume a number of different approaches, not all of which can be done justice by a focused discussion. Accordingly, I shall look mainly at the empiricist strands of analytical philosophy, on the one hand, and at the work of Jacques Derrida, on the other, whose methodology and view of philosophy differ most radically from that prevailing in England and America. My references to Derrida will be illustrative, not exegetical, as my aim is not so much to make his work available as to bring into clear relief the challenges which the analytical and post-structuralist tendencies

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Critical rrheory: Between Ideology and Philosophy Michael Rosen English speaking readers interested in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School have been well served in recent years. Almost all the school's major works have now been translated and several scholarly studies have appeared. Two questions have nevertheless been somewhat under-represented - their status as philosophers and the intellectual consistency of the school. The reasons are, I believe, connected.! It is understandable that the purely philosophical aspect of Critical Theory should have received disproportionately little attention in Britain and America. Although the leading members of the school were trained and continued to regard themselves as philosophers, their writings first attracted attention abroad from sociologists, literary theorists and dissident Marxists, rather than academic philosophers. Working as they did within boundaries set by Kant, Hegel and Marx there hardly appeared to be a bridge of common concern connecting their problems to the anti-metaphysical AngloSaxon philosophical scene of Russell, Wittgenstein and Carnap. Theodor Adorno's stay as an exile in Oxford in the thirties illustrates the gulf between the two worlds. Adorno complains in a letter that he can find no colleagues in the Oxford of Ayer, Ryle, Austin and Berlin sophisticated enough to appreciate his work: 'to make my philosophical affairs comprehensible to the English is an impossibility, and I must reduce my work to a somewhat childish level to continue to be understood'. Ayer, on the other hand, hardly regarded Adorno as a serious philosopher. He recalls him in his autobiography as 'a comic figure with his dandified manner and appearance'. The young philosophers of Oxford were, Ayer says, 'more amused than impressed' by Adorno's expressed interest in the philosophy of music. Clearly, neither was prepared to make concessions in order to appreciate the other.

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The Prescription is Description: Wittgenstein's View of the Human Sciences Theodore R. Schatzki Wittgenstein's view on the nature and task of philosophy have been immensely influential in this century. They are largely responsible, for instance, for the type of philosophy called 'Ordinary Language Philosophy' that flourished at Oxford during the fifties and sixties. The method that Wittgenstein proposes for philosophy involves the careful description of the phenomena involved in and surrounding human action. He also recommends that a formally identical descriptive method he used by the interpretative human sciences (sciences whose goal is to make actions and practices intelligible). Because the type of method used by a discipline is greatly determined by the type of understanding it seeks, the following question naturally arises: in what ways is the type of understanding that Wittgenstein thinks philosophy should seek similar to the type of understanding that he thinks interpretative human science does seek? In view of the fact that recent debate about the foundations of the human sciences has often centered on the interpretative nature of particular disciplines within this field, I think that it will be of some interest to become clear about what Wittgenstein thinks about their interpretative nature and why. 1 This is especially true because Wittgenstein has been used by writers such as P. Winch and K.O. ApeP as a participant in this debate in ways J think are incorrect. Before beginning, it is important to understand the peculiar difficulties facing any writer on Wittgenstein. His work, on the whole, appears to be a somewhat disordered collection of simple remarks, on a wide variety of subjects, whose individual significance and mutual relevance is often unclear - he himself calls them a collection of 'sketches' (PI, preface). 3 In sharp contrast to practically all written

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The Significance of Significance: the Case of Cognitive Psychology C harles Taylor The two approaches to philosophy which the editors in their introduction dub the 'Enlightenment' and the 'understanding' approaches are not only distinguished by a different attitude to natural science. They also constitute different schools of thought within the sciences of man, and carryon their rivalry within these. This is, perhaps, particularly noticeable in psychology, which has always been peculiarly close to philosophy, indeed, was born, in a sense, out of philosophy: the first theories of modern psychology were those propounded by philosophers of the modern 'ways of ideas'. I want in this paper to map a bit of the front, in which the trench warfare between the two views is now being carried on. This segment is around a new position, often referred to by the term 'cognitive psychology', which is used to designate a range of theories which purport to explain intelligent human performances in terms of computations, on the model of those we are familiar with in present day digital computers. These theories were born partly out of the remarkable achievements of computer science, and partly out of deep dissatisfaction with the more and more evident inadequacies of behaviourism to cope with skilled performances of all kinds. Philosophers who support this new approach' see themselves as having broken with the taboos of behaviourism. The computer paradigm enables them to embrace 'mentalistic' explanations without repudiating their allegiances to natural science or materialism. The philosophical debate between the supporters of cognitive psychology and its critics 2 illustrates all the principal features of the battle between 'Enlightenment' and 'understanding' views. And most striking of all, when two such different approaches square off,

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialektik (1973); translated as Negative Dialectics (1973).

Anderson, J.R., Language, Memory, and Thought (1976). Apel, K.O., Analytic Philosophy of Language and the Geisteswissenschaften (1967).

Austin, J.L., 'A Plea for Excuses', in Philosophical Papers (1961). Ayer, A.J., Language, Truth and Logic (1969). Barnes, J., 'Aristote chez les Anglophones', Critique, 100 (1980). Bennett, J., Kant's Analytic (1963). - - , Kant's Dialectic (1968). Boden, Margaret, ArtifICial Intelligence and Natural Man (1977). Cavell, Stanley, Must We Mean What We Say? (1976). Chomsky, Noam, Language and Mind (1968). - - , Rules and Representations (1980). Cohen, G.A., Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978). Davidson, D., 'Truth and Meaning', Synthese, 17 (1974). - - , 'Reply to Foster', in Evans and McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning (1976). Dennett, Daniel, Brainstorms (1978). Derrida, J., De la grammatologie (1967); translated as Of Grammatology (1977). -.-, L'Bcriture et la difference (1967); translated as Writing and Difference (1978).

- , 'La structure, Ie signe et Ie jeu dans Ie discours des sciences humaines', in L'Bcriture et la difference; translated as 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', in Writing and Difference. - - , La Dissemination (1972); translated as Dissemination (1981). - - , 'La mythologie blanche', in Marges de la philosophie (1972); translated as 'White Mythology; Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy', New Literary History, 6 (1974). - - , 'Positions' , in Positions (1972; translated 1981); translated as 'Positions' , Diacritics, 2 & 3 (1972/73).