Frege maintains that there are not two distinct acts, assertion and denial; rather, denying p is one and the same as asserting not-p. Wittgenstein appears not to recognise this identity in Frege, attributing to him the contrary view that a proposition may have one of two verbs, "is true" or "is false". This paper explains Wittgenstein’s attribution as a consequence of Frege’s treatment of content as theoretically prior to the act of judgment. Where content is prior to judgment, the denial (...) of p—what is rejected in asserting p—is distinct from the assertion of not-p. Wittgenstein’s own embrace of Frege’s identity is then considered, an embrace explained in part by his repudiation of Frege’s theoretical order. (shrink)

Frank Ramsey’s philosophy, developed in the 1920s in Cambridge, was in conversation with the debates surrounding intellectualism in the early twentieth century. Ramsey made his mark on the anti-intellectualist tradition via his notion of habit. He posited that human judgments take shape through habitual processes, and he rejected the separation between the domain of reason, on one hand, and the domain of habit, on the other. Ramsey also provided the ground to explore the nature of knowledge employed in acting from (...) habit. That ground was passed onto Margaret MacDonald who came up with the distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to apply a rule (or habit), the distinction that set the stage for Gilbert Ryle’s philosophical project against intellectualism from the 1940s onward. Ramsey thus influenced Ryle’s account of knowledge through the channel of MacDonald. (shrink)

This paper uses the concept of metalinguistic negotiation, drawn from contemporary philosophy of language, to develop a novel interpretation of Carnap and Quine’s debate about ontology. Like recent revisionary accounts of the debate, it argues that the widespread perception of first-order disagreement between the two is misleading, ascribing this misperception to Carnap and Quine’s divergent usage of “ontology” and its cognates. Once this difference is accounted for, their seemingly contradictory claims about the subject can be reconciled, as the two “talk (...) past” each other on the semantic level. Crucially, however, this does not render their dispute merely verbal. Rather, it emerges as a remarkably consequential metalinguistic negotiation over whether the term “ontology” ought to be reinterpreted or replaced for the purposes of positive philosophical theorizing. This reading provides an account of the genuine disagreement that drove Carnap and Quine to engage in their debate and illuminates the broader metaphilosophical convictions that support each of their positions. As such, it addresses an important explanatory challenge facing members of the revisionary camp. (shrink)