One of the most characteristic claims of the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as the philosophy of ordinary language, is that traditional philosophical discourse has usually been logically improper because it has depended upon systematic misuses of certain expressions in ordinary language and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with the description of the actual use of language. To substantiate this claim, the philosopher of ordinary language has had (...) to establish at least the following two general philosophical theses, which together seem to constitute the hard core of original doctrine in the philosophy of ordinary language. First, that the meaning of an expression is its use and not its referent or what it corresponds to. Second, that the description of the uses of certain expressions in language is not merely a study of words but genuinely solves the same problems which traditional philosophy had tried to solve through other methods. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine two major arguments in favour of the philosophical thesis that the meaning of an expression is its use, and not its referent or what it corresponds to. A second philosophical thesis which is closely related to the first is that the study of the ordinary, “actual” uses of certain expressions is not of purely linguistic interest but in fact is a way, probably the only proper way, of solving the problems of traditional (...) philosophy; in the sequel to the present article, we shall examine one major argument in favour of this second thesis. Both theses occupy a place of central importance in the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as “the philosophy of ordinary language”. Together they seem to constitute the basis of the most characteristic claim of this movement: that traditional philosophic discourse is logically improper and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with “the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language” by describing “the actual use of language”. Both theses are necessary for the justifi cation of this more general claim. (shrink)

not analytic. This seems to be the point of Kant's claim that the concept of the sum of seven and five does not include its equality to the number twelve ...

Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human knowledge, and antirealist metaphysics holds that the world depends on our cognitive capacities. But humans good and knowledge, including their language and concepts, are empirical matters, whereas philosophers do not engage in empirical research. And humans are inhabitants, not 'makers', of the world. Nevertheless, all three can be drastically reinterpreted as making no reference to humans.".

Are there nonexistent things? What is the nature of informative identity statements? Are the notions of essential property and of essence intelligible, and, if so, how are they to be understood? Are individual things material substances or clusters of qualities? Can the account of the unity of a complex entity avoid vicious infinite regresses? These questions have attracted widespread attention among philosophers recently, as evidenced by a proliferation of articles in the leading philosophical journals. In Being Qua Being they receive (...) systematic, unified treatment, grounded in an account of the nature of the application to the world of our conceptual apparatus. A central thesis of the book is that the topic of identity is primary, and that existence and predication, both essential and accidental, are to be understood in terms of identity. (shrink)

One of the most important and perennially debated philosophical questions is whether we can have knowledge of the external world. Butchvarov here considers whether and how skepticism with regard to such knowledge can be refuted or at least answered. He argues that only a direct realist view of perception has any hope of providing a compelling response to the skeptic and introduces the radical innovation that the direct object of perceptual, and even dreaming and hallucinatory, experience is always a material (...) object, but not necessarily one that actually exists. This leads him to a metaphysics in which reality is ultimately constructed by human decisions out of objects that are ontologically more basic but which cannot be said in themselves to be either real or unreal. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II.

Fundamental disagreements in epistemology arise from legitimate differences of interest, not genuine conflict. It is because of such differences that there are three varieties of epistemology: naturalistic, subjective, and what I shall call epistemology-as-logic. All three have been with us at least since Socrates. My chief concern will be with the third, but I must begin with the first and second, which constitute standard epistemology.

The standard arguments for antirealism are densely abstract, often enigmatic, and thus unpersuasive. The ubiquity and irreducibility of what linguists call generic statements provides a clear argument from a specific and readily understandable case. We think and talk about the world as necessarily subject to generalization. But the chief vehicles of generalization are generic statements, typically of the form “Fs are G,” not universal statements, typically of the form “All Fs are G.” Universal statements themselves are usually intended and understood (...) as though they were only generic. Even if there are universal facts, as Russell held, there are no generic facts. There is no genericity in the world as it is “in-itself.” There is genericity in it only as it is “for-us.”. (shrink)

The common belief that the epistemic credentials of ethics are quite questionable, and therefore in need of special justification, is an illusion made possible by the logical gap between reason and belief. This gap manifests itself sometimes even outside ethics. In ethics its manifestations are common, because of the practical nature of ethics. The attempt to cover it up takes the form of exorbitant demands for justification and often leads to espousing noncognitivism.

The skepticism I propose to discuss concerns the reality of an external world of perceivable material objects. There are three questions our skeptic may ask. The first is nonmodal and nonepistemic: Are some of the objects we perceive real? The second is also nonmodal but epistemic: Do we know, or at least have evidence, that some of the objects we perceive are real? The third is both modal and epistemic: Can we know, or at least have evidence, that some of (...) the objects we perceive are real? By definition, the epistemic questions are the ones the skeptic asks. But I shall take the first, the nonepistemic question as primary; it is, surely, also the one in which we, including the skeptic, are really interested. The traditional approach to skepticism has been to take it as asking one or both of the epistemic questions. I suggest that.. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s distinction in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus between what can be said and what can only be shown provides a welcome alternative to the stark choice between contemporary realism and antirealism.[i] It concerns what he thought was “the cardinal problem of philosophy.” Tough-minded philosophers often ask, “What are those things that can only be shown?” But their question misses the point of the distinction. What can only be shown is not a part of reality. But neither is it unreal.

But how can any entity be not self-identical? If it is both itself and another, then it is not an entity but a pair of entities. At best, an entity which is not self-identical is a series of concrete, self-identical, unchanging entities, parallel to what Whitehead calls "personal order." But even then the series itself would be self-identical qua a series, although its constituents exhibit successive differences. Therefore, to speak of entities which are not self-identical is either not precise or (...) contradictory. It is not precise if two or more entities are referred to as one entity, even if this one entity is then said to be not self-identical. It is contradictory if a self-identical series or collection of self-identical entities is called a non-self-identical entity. Therefore, for the same reason for which a concrete entity cannot change, no entity can change. (shrink)