Preface - Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language

The phrase “analytic philosophy” brings to many people’s minds two ideas, that linguistic analysis is a favored philosophical method and that the issue of the meaning of human life is either “senseless” or too vague to be a fitting subject of inquiry. It is thought by many that if one is interested in theories of the meaning or meaninglessness of life, then one must turn not to twentieth-century analytic philosophy, but perhaps to existentialism or even to novels or poetry.

This stereotype of analytic philosophy is exemplified by Stephen Hawking’s remarks in his popular book A Brief History of Time. Hawking believes that even physics provides a more direct treatment of the topic of life’s meaning than analytic philosophy. He articulates the popular view that analytic philosophers have abandoned the perennial questions, such as the “why” of it all, and have turned to linguistic analysis instead: “Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said ‘The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.’ What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!” Physics, by contrast, aims to answer “the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.”[1]

Some analytic philosophers who do explicitly discuss the meaning of life, such as E. D. Klemke, claim that they can address the issue but not as analytic philosophers. Klemke writes that “most philosophical problems are highly technical and . . . the making of minute distinctions and the employment of a specialized vocabulary are essential for the solution of such problems. . . . On the other hand, I am inclined to think that the philosopher ought to occasionally leave the study, or the philosophical association lecture hail, or even the classroom, and, having shed his aristocratic garments, speak as a man among other men.”[2]

One purpose of this book is to show that this widespread interpretation of analytic philosophy is in many respects mistaken and that theories of the ethical or religious meaning (or meaninglessness) of human life follow directly from the methods of linguistic analysis used by many analytic philosophers. It will appear, contrary to what Hawking says, that analytic philosophers have always been concerned with the ultimate questions and that the concern with language is not an end in itself but a method by which these questions are approached. Many will grant that concern with ultimate questions has become widespread in analytic philosophy since the 19705 with the renewed interest in theism, normative ethics, and moral realism, but it needs to be shown that this concern has been here all along, beginning with the logical realism of the early G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell and extending through logical positivism, ordinary language analysis, and linguistic essentialism. This concern is present in Rudolf Carnap as well as in Alvin Plantinga, despite the radically different conclusions of these two authors.

Furthermore, it will appear (contrary to Klemke’s suggestion) that treatment of the issue of the meaning or lack of meaning of human life does not require a departure from the normal and technical ways of doing analytic philosophy but is itself a normal and technical way of doing analytic philosophy. Issues in the philosophy of language and their implications for the meaning or meaninglessness of human life have been treated rigorously and exactly in the analytic tradition.

My concern with the meaning or meaninglessness of human life is about objective rather than subjective meaning. Human life has an objective ethical meaning if and only if moral realism is true, that is, if and only if moral facts obtain independently of whether humans believe they obtain. Human life has an objective religious meaning if and only if theism is true. Because analytic philosophers have been concerned almost exclusively with Judeo-Christian monotheism, this type of theism will be the topic in my discussions of the philosophy of religion. In the Conclusion, I shall discuss a different kind of theism: a naturalistic pantheism.

Subjective meaning may vary from one human life to another and may be defined in terms of what a person cares about and what goals she strives for. A human’s life is subjectively meaningful if and only if she cares about some things and strives for some goals. Subjective meaning is a degreed concept, its limiting case being a subjectively meaningless life, one in which a person cares about nothing and has no goals. If human life lacks both an objective ethical meaning and an objective religious meaning, there still can be subjective meanings. Indeed, the standard position of the atheist and moral antirealist is that the only meanings human life can possess are subjective meanings.

The topic of this book is objective ethical and religious meaning, and that is how I shall use the phrase “the meaning of human life.” I shall discuss whether and how theses about objective ethical or religious meaning (or meaninglessness) can be known by various methods of linguistic analysis.

A method of linguistic analysis may be defined in a number of ways, but the definition I shall adopt implies that a philosopher uses this method if the conclusions she reaches in the discipline of the philosophy of language are premises of central arguments developed n other philosophical disciplines. This definition is not as idiosyncratic as it might appear to some at first glance, because certain other popular definitions of this method can be reduced to this definition. For example, it is often said that the method of linguistic analysis (as employed in some philosophical discipline) involves explicating the sense (meaning) of the key words pertinent to the subject matter of that discipline. (Philosophers frequently talk about the “meaning” of words, but to avoid confusing this use of “meaning” with its use in “the meaning of human life,” I shall talk about the “sense” of words.) Thus, the subject matter of ethics is studied by explicating the sense of such words as “good,” “right,” “duty,” and the like. This definition, however, is reducible to the definition I offer. For the philosopher typically explicates the sense of such words by applying to them theses about the nature of linguistic sense that belong to his philosophy of language. For example, the predominant philosophy of language in logical positivism is captured in the slogan, “The sense of a (nontautological and non-self-contradictory) sentence is the method of its verification,” and this method was characterized by many positivists as an acquaintance with the relevant sense-data that confirm or disconfirm the sentence in question.

This thesis about linguistic sense is a crucial premise in the positivist ethical theory known as “emotivism.” The following summary argument for some versions of emotivism may be constructed:

The conclusion implies, of course, that there is no objective ethical meaning of human life. This positivist theory will be discussed in more detail in chapter 2, but let me briefly note here that premises (i) and (2) are theses developed in the discipline of the philosophy of language, and they are premises from which key conclusions in the discipline of ethics are derived. In some respects, the discipline of the philosophy of language is more fundamental than the discipline of ethics and other disciplines, in that its conclusions serve as premises of major arguments developed in the other disciplines. The method of linguistic analysis may thus be understood as the methodological procedure of using the conclusions reached in the philosophy of language as premises of other disciplines.

This method is widely used in analytic philosophy, but, as everyone knows, it is not the only method used by analytic philosophers. For instance, the method of linguistic analysis is no more the main or only method used in John Rawls’s Theory of justice than it is in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I am concerned, however, to show that the connection between the use of this linguistic method and the perennial philosophical questions is far more intimate than is normally supposed; linguistic analysis provides no less direct a route to the perennial issues about meaning than does the phenomenological method used by the existentialists.

Many of the movements in analytic philosophy, for example, logical positivism and ordinary language analysis, may be characterized in terms of the different versions of the method of linguistic analysis they employ. By a version of the method of linguistic analysis I mean a use of a specific thesis about linguistic sense as a premise from which to derive conclusions in the various philosophical disciplines. Different versions of this method correspond to different theses about linguistic sense. In this book, I shall distinguish four movements in analytic philosophy and show that each uses a different version of the method of linguistic analysis. The relevant four theses about linguistic sense may be summarized by a certain statement or slogan about the sense of words or sentences. These four statements are as follows:

It is worth emphasizing that “sense” is the generic word I use for semantic content and does not correspond to how members of these four movements used the word. For example, many essentialists, including Ruth Barcan Marcus, Saul Kripke, David Kaplan, Hilary Putnam, and N. Salmon, distinguish their view from earlier views by saying that the semantic content of many singular and general words is not a “Fregean sense” but is instead the direct referent of these words, this referent being the rigid designatum.

I shall argue that these four analytic movements are associated with the following theses about objective meaning:

Ordinary language analysis: Human life is ethically and religiously meaningless.

Linguistic essentialism: (For some essentialists) human life has an ethical and religious meaning. .

Linguistic essentialism (Marcus, Kripke, Plantinga, Robert Adams, David Brink, Thomas Hurka, and others) differs from the other three movements in that it embraces a wide divergence of views about life’s meaning or meaninglessness. I

The versions of the method of linguistic analysis encapsulated by these slogans are historically sequential, beginning with logical realism and ending with linguistic essentialism, a current phase. But these are not the only phases of analytic philosophy. For example, such analysts as Richard Swinburne and John Rawis are not members of any of these four movements. Furthermore, these are not the only versions of the linguistic method used by analytic philosophers; for example, there is a tradition associated with the causal theory of reference. My treatment of analytic philosophy in this book is selective and is meant to illustrate my thesis about linguistic analysis and ethical and religious meaning. This book is not in tended as a history of analytic philosophy; Gottlob Frege, W. V. O. Quine, Carl Hempel, and other major figures are not discussed, and the topics discussed are confined to some themes in the philosophy of language, ethics, and the philosophy of religion.

Chapter I is devoted to logical realism, and the subsequent chapters to the other three movements. The book is structured in such a way that the discussions of the four analytic movements are not of equal length, but of progressively increasing length. The discussion of logical realism is the shortest, and the discussion of linguistic essentialism the longest. Part I is about logical realism, logical positivism, and ordinary language analysis, and part II is about linguistic essentialism. Linguistic essentialism is given the most lengthy treatment because its history is the least known (and the most inaccurately represented in the current literature), and the movement has the greatest relevance to contemporary philosophical debates.

The discussion of these four movements includes as much critical evaluation as exposition. I shall argue that the respective theses about objective meaning of the four movements are not adequately justified by the arguments offered by members of these movements, and I shall work toward a positive theory of objective meaning, which shall be a version of naturalist moral realism (in the perfectionist tradition of ethics) and naturalist pantheism. My criticisms of these four movements will prepare the ground for the main positive part of this book, which mostly appears in chapter 6 (my argument for perfectionism) and the Conclusion (my argument for pantheism). My arguments for a novel version of naturalist perfectionism and pantheism are the most important philosophical (as distinct from historical) aspects of this book. From this philosophical perspective, my analyses and criticisms of the four analytic movements may be viewed as means to the end of developing these new theories in metaethics, ethics, and philosophy of religion.

This book was written in the years 1988-96. I should like to thank Kristin Andrews, Kent Baidner, David Brink, Panayot Butchvarov, Nino Cocchiarella, Michael Devitt, Joseph Ellin, Arthur Falk, Thomas Hurka, David Kaplan, Laurie Paul, Alvin Plantinga, Michael Pritchard, David Schenk, William F Vallicella, and two referees for Yale University Press for helpful comments about some of the ideas in various drafts of the book. I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for a 1996 Fellowship and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a 1995 Summer Stipend, which enabled me to complete the book.

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[1] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York; Bantam Books, 1998), 174-75.

[2] E.D. Klemke, “Living without Appeal: An Affirmative Philosophy of Life,” in The Meaning of Life, ed. E.D. Klemke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 163.