See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/340815584

Prologue to Michael Dummett's Origins of Analytical Philosophy

Preprint · April 2018

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11418.80328

CITATIONS READS

0 147

1 author:

Gianluigi Oliveri
Università degli Studi di Palermo
26 PUBLICATIONS   62 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Sull'attuale importanza di un'antica metafora in matematica View project

Concepts representation View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Gianluigi Oliveri on 21 April 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Prologue
to
Michael Dummett’s
Origins of Analytical Philosophy
Gianluigi Oliveri
University of Palermo
ICAR - CNR
gianluigi.oliveri@unipa.it

April 7, 2018

1 Some methodological remarks

Writing on a school of thought in philosophy is something that can be done in
various different ways. A possible approach to this problem is that typical of
the historian of philosophy whose sole purpose is that of providing a faithful
and exhaustive description of all the important factors involved in the birth,
and evolution in time, of the school of philosophy which is the object of his
investigations.
An important part of this way of proceeding consists in determining who
contributed what, where, and when; who influenced whom; and in giving
a detailed reconstruction of the context within which the works of the au-
thors considered appeared, and were discussed. And what we mean here
by ‘context’ is not simply the cultural framework of problems, and intellec-
tual fashions of the day, but also all those ‘external’ conditioning forces —
institutions, politics, etc. — which usually perform the important rôle of
catalysts not only in philosophy, but also in science. Well known cases of the
destructive effects of such external conditioning forces on the course of the
history of philosophy are those of Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella,
and Galileo Galiei and, in more recent times, that of the Vienna Circle.
Therefore, an historical study of, say, post-Renaissance empiricism car-
ried out according to the descriptive approach could not do without taking

1
into account the scientific revolution of the XVIIth century which, besides
introducing very important philosophical distinctions — for example, that
between primary and secondary qualities (Galileo) — by means of the use of
the telescope and the microscope, produced a vast amount of new information
about the universe which could only be acquired through the senses.
An approach to the study of a school of philosophy, alternative to that
discussed above, consists in bracketing all considerations concerning priority
claims, etc. and what we have called ‘external conditioning forces,’ to con-
centrate only on the history of ideas, that is, on the purely rational ‘internal
process’ whereby certain views came to shape a philosophy.
An example of this way of doing history of philosophy applied to post-
Renaissance empiricism would be to study how this school of thought evolved
in time exclusively in relation to the various responses present in the literature
to the critical challenge posed by objections such as ‘How can you say that
the mind is a tabula rasa on which the senses inscribe ideas?’, ‘How can
you justify causality from experience?’, ‘How can you say that mathematical
knowledge is empirical?’, etc.
The observations above leave no room for doubt on how to classify Michael
Dummett’s Origins of Analytical Philosophy. It, certainly, is an exercise in
the history of ideas. Indeed, Dummett’s analysis of the thought of Bolzano,
Brentano, Meinong, Frege, and various others, never takes into account the
external conditioning forces nor does Dummett engage with questions relat-
ing to priority claims nor with “[W]hether X derived a certain idea from Y
or arrived at it independently.”1
Having clarified what kind of history of philosophy is that to be found in
Origins of Analytical Philosophy, the next issue we need to address is what
motivates Dummett to write the book.

2 Motivations
When in a mathematical theory suddenly emerge deep anomalies and/or
paradoxes, some mathematicians tend to ‘go back’ to the foundations of the
theory to individuate the reasons behind the trouble and fix it, if they can. In
the same way Dummett, having realised that Gareth Evans’ The Varieties of
Reference marks a deep point of departure from the analytical school, decided
to justify his opinion about this matter through a rational reconstruction of
the history of analytical philosophy.
In fact, since analytical philosophy has developed, as it were, informally,
that is, as a consequence of the acceptance of methods and ideas that were
1
Dummett (1993), Chapter 1, p. 3.

2
not explicitly stated from the beginning, but were present in the work of some
thinkers who a posteriori were recognised as important analytical philoso-
phers, it follows that only a rigorous historical account of this school of
thought can justify the identification of its tenets and, consequently, the
opinion that the work done in The Varieties of Reference is incompatible
with some of them.
Another reason that led Dummett to write Origins of Analytical Philos-
ophy was his desire to re-establish the long since lost communication be-
tween analytical philosophers and [Husserlian] phenomenologists ‘by going
back to the point of divergence’2 of these two schools of thought. This, of
course, means that part of the book is dedicated to a discussion of aspects
of Husserl’s phenomenology. And, in this context, it is important to notice
that such a discussion, besides casting light upon the ‘communication issue’
dear to Dummett, ends up offering, through a comparative analysis of the
roots of analytical philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology, a characterisa-
tion of analytical philosophy that turns out to be shaper than it would have
otherwise been.
Lastly, as the missing definite article in the title shows, Dummett’s pre-
tension in writing this book is not that of giving a comprehensive, let alone
complete, account of the ideas from which analytical philosophy originated.
He explicitly says that in producing his book on the origins of analytical
philosophy his attention is going to focus only on those philosophers who
can be listed among the ones who contributed to the birth of this school of
thought, and have written their works in German.
According to Dummett, the main reason for this choice is that whereas
there is much in the literature on the contributions that Russell and Moore
gave to analytical philosophy, very little there appears to be on the connec-
tion existing between the thought of, for example, Bolzano, Brentano, and
Meinong, and analytical philosophy.
However, it seems to us that, besides what we have just reported, there
is a deeper reason behind Dummett’s choice. And that is that the above
mentioned authors, together with Frege — the true grandfather of analytical
philosophy — have contributed to what Dummett calls the ‘extrusion of
thoughts from the mind.’ This is the idea that thoughts, in contrast with
psychological entities like images and sensations, are objective. As is well
known, we find in Frege’s essay ‘Thoughts’ one of the clearest expressions of
such a thesis which crystallises in the belief in the existence of a third realm
of reality, the realm of thought.3
2
Dummett (1993), Appendix Inteview, p. 193.
3
For Frege, besides the third realm there two other realms of reality: the first realm,

3
 Now, the extrusion of thoughts from the mind, apart from being a momen-
tous step in philosophy initiating a new subject, a subject which we might call
‘philosophy of thought,’ is very important for analytical philosophy. And the
reason for this is that, according to Dummett, the extrusion of thoughts from
the mind is directly connected with the most important dogma of analytical
philosophy: the priority thesis. As we shall see in the next two sections, the
acceptance of the priority thesis is one of the most important factors behind
the so-called ‘linguistic turn,’ the hallmark of analytical philosophy.

3 The priority thesis

Before discussing the priority thesis and, eventually, the linguistic turn (§4),
we need to say something more on the importance of a philosophy of thought.
As Dummett himself claims in The Logical Basis of Metaphysics:4

The optician cannot tell us what we are going to see when

we look about us: he provides us with spectacles that bring all
that we see into sharper focus. The philosopher aims to perform
a similar service in respect to our thinking about reality. This
means, however, that the starting point of philosophy has to be
an analysis of the fundamental structure of our thoughts. What
may be called the philosophy of thought underlies all the rest.

But if it is, now, clear why developing a philosophy of thought is an extremely

important task to accomplish in philosophy, it is not so clear whether the
idea of constructing a philosophy of thought is new; and how the philosophy
of thought is related to the priority thesis and, eventually, to the linguistic
turn.
With regard to the first question above, although the extrusion of thoughts
from the mind makes of the analytical way of pursuing a philosophy of
thought something new, nevertheless, the foundational, and preliminary, rôle
assigned to the philosophy of thought with regard to the rest of philosophy
makes of the philosophy of thought the direct heir to a much older tradition
which includes authors such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant.
For Descartes, a philosopher, in his quest for truth, should: (1) investigate
only those ‘[O]bjects of which our minds seem capable of having certain and
indubitable cognition’;5 and (2) discover an effective method for conducting
the realm of concrete objects; and the second realm whose elements are representations,
that is, images and sensations.
4
Dummett (1991), Introduction, p. 2.
5
Descartes (1684), p. 10.

4
his research.6 But, of course, to accomplish task (1) above, before starting
our investigations concerning specific questions, we should produce a correct
theory of mind/reason/thought. And we should then individuate, by its help,
our cognitive limitations, and thus decide whether or not the questions that
interest us lie within the range of ‘[O]bjects of which our minds seem capable
of having certain and indubitable cognition’. (This was, precisely, one of the
things that Kant thought he had done in the Critique of Pure Reason.) On
the other hand, to accomplish task (2), it would be perfectly acceptable the
action of, for example, setting up a Leibnizian Characteristica Universalis
capable of resolving philosophical disputes.
At this point of the discussion the connection between this older philo-
sophical research programme — originating from Descartes’ Rules for the
direction of the mind — and Frege’s ideas should emerge in full view. For,
according to Frege, logic is an ideal non-psychological theory of thought;7
and, secondly, his indebtedness to Leibniz’s Characteristica Universalis is
explicitly acknowledged in a well known passage where he says:8

I did not wish to present an abstract logic in formulas [with the

invention of the Conceptual Notation], but to express a content
through written symbols in a more precise and perspicuous way
than is possible with words. In fact, I wished to produce, not a
mere Calculus Ratiocinator, but a Lingua Characteristica in the
Leibnizian sense.

To address, now, the question of how the philosophy of thought is re-

lated to the priority thesis and, eventually, to the linguistic turn, we need to
state what we mean by ‘priority thesis.’ The priority thesis is the idea that
language is prior to thought, in the order of explanation, that is, from a cor-
rect theory of language it is possible to obtain a rigorous non-psychological
6
“We need a method if we are to investigate the truth of things.” [Descartes (1684), p.
15.]
7
See on this the following quotations:
I mean by ‘a thought’ something for which the question of truth can arise
at all. [Frege (1977a), p. 4.]
and
In order to avoid any misunderstanding and prevent the blurring of the
boundary between psychology and logic, I assign to logic the task of discov-
ering the laws of truth, not the laws of taking things to be true or of thinking
[but of thought]. [Frege (1977a), p. 2.]

8
Frege (1972), pp. 90–91.

5
theory of thought, and that there is no other way of obtaining a rigorous
non-psychological theory of thought.
Now, the priority thesis is not seen by analytical philosophers as self-
evidently true, but as depending upon: (i) the so-called ‘isomorphism thesis’
(shared by Frege and others); and on (ii) the idea that, if we were to develop
a theory of thought independently of language, we could not dispense in our
work with psychology.
Analytical philosophers believe that the priority thesis depends upon the
isomorphism thesis, because it is the existence of an isomorphism between a
proposition and the thought expressed by it9 that explains the reason why
the study of language, that is, the study of the structure of propositions, etc.
ought to lead to a rigorous non-psychological theory of thought.
On the other hand, they think that the priority thesis depends also on
point (ii) above, because, if we were to develop a theory of thought indepen-
dently of language, we would not be able to distinguish between a thought,
and what is involved in the process of thinking it (psychology).
Having shown how the idea of a philosophy of thought is related to the
priority thesis, we need to say something about what all this has to do with
the linguistic turn.

4 The linguistic turn

According to Dummett:10
What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse mani-
festations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosoph-
ical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical
account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account
can only be so attained.
Now, apart from the striking resemblance existing between the two ‘ax-
ioms’ in the quotation above, and the priority thesis, it looks as if, for Dum-
mett, the main characteristic of analytical philosophy — the linguistic turn
— simply consists in the acceptance of his two axioms/the priority thesis.
9
See on this:
The sentence can be regarded as an image of the thought in that to the
relation between the part and the whole within the thought there by and
large corresponds the same relation between the part of the sentence and the
sentence.
Frege (1979c) in Dummett (1993), Chapter 2, p. 6.
10
Dummett (1993), Chapter 2, p. 4.

6
But, if our interpretation of Dummett’s position is correct, it seems to us
that this is not entirely justifiable. For, whereas the range of application of
the priority thesis/Dummett’s axioms is limited to the theory of thought,
if we look at the evidence provided by the history of philosophy, we realise
that the logical analysis of language is the method adopted by analytical
philosophers right across the board. This, of course, implies that we need a
definition of linguistic turn that transcends the priority thesis (from now on
we are no longer going to repeat ‘and Dummett’s axioms.’)
If by ‘linguistic turn’ we mean the belief that the logical analysis of lan-
guage is the method that should be adopted to do philosophy in a rigorous
way,11 we can easily see that the linguistic turn, besides being a realization
of Descartes’ second requirement for a philosopher to conduct his quest for
truth (see p. 4), looks very much like a generalisation of the priority thesis
to any branch of philosophical investigation.
But, what can have justified such a generalisation contributing, in this
way, to the acceptance of the linguistic turn among the practitioners of an-
alytical philosophy? This is a legitimate question to ask, because of: (a)
the lack of an obvious relevant similarity between fields so different from one
another as the philosophy of thought, the philosophy of science, ethics, the
philosophy of law, etc.; and of (b) the doubts that even some of the founding
fathers, or grandfathers, of analytical philosophy had about the priority the-
sis, not to mention the linguistic turn. A striking example of a philosopher
falling squarely under point (b) above is that of Frege.
As Dummett recalls:12

[Frege’s] official view is that it is not intrinsic to thoughts to

be expressed in language, and that there is no contradiction in
supposing beings who can grasp them in their nakedness, divested
of linguistic clothing, but that ‘it is necessary for us men that a
thought of which we are conscious is connected in our conscious-
ness with one or another sentence.’

Therefore, for Frege, the priority thesis, in its full generality, is, strictly
speaking, false, as would be false the second of the two ‘twin axioms’ the
acceptance of which, for Dummett, is at the root of the linguistic turn. There
are, however, occasions in which a restricted (to humans) version of the
priority thesis seems to be peering over Frege’s shoulder, in the rôle of implicit
assumption, within some of his reasonings. Perhaps, one of the best known
such cases is that present in §62 of The Foundations of Arithmetic where, by
11
Oliveri (2015), §7 Sulla nascita della filosofia analitica, footnote 50, Principio 7.7.
12
See Frege (1979b), p. 269 in Dummett (1993), Chapter 10, p. 108.

7
means of the context principle, Frege explains how numbers are given to us
in the formulation of identity criteria (for numbers) in language.13
Moreover, his aim in producing the Conceptual Notation is, as far as
philosophy is concerned, not that of causing a linguistic turn, but the more
modest one of eliminating the ‘noise’ that ordinary language brings into philo-
sophical discussions.14
All these considerations lead us to conclude that in Frege there appears
to be no ‘internal route’ going from the priority thesis, or from Dummett’s
twin axioms, to the linguistic turn. What we find, instead, is the extrusion of
thought from the mind, a theory of thought cast in terms of a theory of the
laws of truth (logic), and a Conceptual Notation that is presented to us as
‘a’ useful tool for the philosopher to be used against the bewitching powers
of ordinary language over the human spirit.
On the other hand, if we were to extend our look beyond Frege, and the
philosophers considered by Dummett in his book, perhaps we could find a
plausible explanation for the appearance, and acceptance, of the linguistic
turn. And, indeed, we can find such an explanation in Russell’s momentous
discovery that:15
[T]he apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its
13
Frege (1884), §62, p. 73:
How, then, are numbers to be given to us, if we cannot have any ideas
or intuitions of them? Since it is only in the context of a proposition that
words have any meaning, our problem becomes this: To define the sense of
a proposition in which a number word occurs. [. . . ] In our present case, we
have to define the sense of the proposition “the number which belongs to the
concept F is the same as that which belongs to the concept G’.’

14
Frege (1879), p. 7:
If it is one of the tasks of philosophy to break the domination of the word
over the human spirit by laying bare the misconceptions that through the use
of language often almost unavoidably arise concerning the relations between
concepts and by freeing thought from that with which only the means of
expression of ordinary language, constituted as they are, saddle it, then my
ideography, further developed for these purposes, can become a useful tool
for the philosopher. To be sure, it too will fail to reproduce ideas in a pure
form, and this is probably inevitable when ideas are represented by concrete
means; but, on the one hand, we can restrict the discrepancies to those that
are unavoidable and harmless, and, on the other, the fact that they are of a
completely different kind from those peculiar to ordinary language already
affords protection against the specific influence that a particular means of
expression might exercise.

15
Wittgenstein (1921), §4.0031, p. 19.

8
 real one.

As is well known, it was only when Russell provided concrete examples

in which, by revealing the real logical form of propositions, the logical anal-
ysis of language seemed to have a successful impact on: (1) the dissolution
of the logical, set-theoretical, and semantical paradoxes; (2) the elimination
of the difficulties concerning denoting; and on (3) metaphysics — via the
Russell/Wittgenstein doctrine of logical atomism — that part of the philo-
sophical community became converted to the linguistic turn.16
At this juncture of our critical discussion of Dummett’s elucidation of
some of the central tenets of analytical philosophy, we can conclude that: (α)
the priority thesis is one of the dogmas of analytical philosophy; (β) Evans’
contributions present in The Varieties of Reference are incompatible with
the priority thesis, because, as Dummett says, Evans, in his book, defends
the idea:17

[T]hat language can be explained only in terms of antecedently

given notions of different types of thought, considered indepen-
dently of their linguistic expression[;]

(γ) Dummett’s concern about Evans parting company with analytical phi-
losophy is justified.
But, now, what about Dummett’s desire to find the point of divergence
of Husserlian phenomenology from analytic philosophy?

5 Frege and Husserl

Since Frege and Husserl share the idea that ‘[T]houghts [are] removed from
the inner world of mental experience,’18 it is legitimate to ask what could
have prevented Husserl from accepting the relativized priority thesis, taking,
in this way, a decisive step in the direction of the linguistic turn. According to
Dummett, an answer to this question may be forthcoming, if we are prepared
to engage in a critical comparison of the Husserlian notion of noema with
the Fregean concept of sense.
As is well known, for Frege, a proper name19 like ‘The star nearest to
the Earth’ has a reference, a sense, and a representation. The reference is
16
See on this Oliveri (2015), especially §§3–5 and 7.
17
Dummett (1993), Chapter 2, p. 4.
18
Dummett (1993), Chapter 4, p. 26.
19
A proper name is a word (or a sign or a connection of signs or an expression) endowed
with a sense, and a unique reference.

9
the unique object, the Sun, the proper name refers to, the sense is the way
the reference of the proper name is presented to us, and the representation
is our subjective image of the Sun. According to Frege, the property of
having a sense and a reference is not confined to proper names. Declarative
sentences, in which the only thing that interests us is the denotation of the
words occurring in them, have a reference and a sense as well, a reference
and a sense represented, respectively, by a truth-value and a thought.
For Frege, a referring expression relates to its object through its sense,
whereas, according to Husserl, each intentional experience has a noema
which, like a Fregean sense, connects the experience to its object. An exam-
ple of an Husserlian noema at work is given by the perceptual phenomenon
known, after Wittgenstein, as seeing-as.
When we see an object, that is, when we have an intentional visual experi-
ence, we are conscious of something that is given to us as three-dimensional,
transparent, opaque, etc. And, for Husserl, the involvement of consciousness
in having an intentional visual experience shows, in particular, that this is
a noetic process. Now, the noematic content, or noema, of our intentional
visual experience is the way in which the object is given to us. Therefore,
without a noema there is no perception of an object, and no intentional
experience at all.
However, Dummett argues, since visual perception is, generally speaking,
a non-linguistic mental act, it follows that, independently of the involve-
ment of consciousness in visual perception, its noema is bound to be a ‘non-
linguistic animator,’ as Dummett calls it. And this, according to Dummett,
shows that, on the one hand,20
[T]he notion of a noema is a generalisation of that of sense
to all mental acts, that is, to all acts or states possessing the
characteristic of intentionality[;]
and that, on the other hand, such a generalisation of the notion of sense to
all mental acts proves to be fatal to the possibility of accepting anything
like the relativised priority thesis (what he calls ‘linguistic turn’). For, if we
accept the notion of noema as an animator involved in all mental acts then:21
[L]anguage can play no especial part in the study and descrip-
tion of [. . . ] non-linguistic animators of non-linguistic mental
acts.
But, if the concept of noema makes impossible for Husserl to go with
Frege down the road leading to analytical philosophy, likewise the Fregean
20
Dummett (1993), Chapter 7, p. 74.
21
Dummett (1993), Chapter 4, p. 27.

10
concept of sense makes impossible for Frege to follow Husserl. And the reason
for this latter state of affairs is, according to Dummett, that:22
Frege’s notion of sense [. . . ] was incapable of generalisation.
Senses, for him, even if not intrinsically the senses of linguistic
expressions, were intrinsically apt to be expressed in language;
they stood in the closest connection with the truth of thoughts
of which they were constituents. Hence nothing that was not a
sense could be in the least like a sense[.]
From the discussion above we have that, for Dummett, the point of di-
vergence of analytical philosophy from Husserlian phenomenology lies in the
difference between Fregean senses and Husserlian noemata. This is an illu-
minating, and, as we have seen in this section, perfectly reasonable view that
we share, and are not going to labour any further. Our attention is, now,
going to focus on the central issue of Origins of Analytical Philosophy, that
is, the relation between language and thought.

6 Language and thought

According to Dummett, analytical philosophy is characterised by the problem
of developing a non-psychological theory of thought, and by the peculiar
solution offered to this question, a solution that goes under the name of
‘priority thesis’: language is prior to thought, in the order of explanation
(see §3, pp. 5–6).
As we have seen in previous sections, the first step taken, along the
way to analytical philosophy, was disentangling the philosophy of thought
from philosophical psychology. On this, both Frege and Husserl agreed, even
though the difference between Frege’s notion of sense, and Husserl’s concept
of noema was such that it was impossible, for Husserl, to accept the priority
thesis.
Frege’s own position on the priority thesis was, actually, rather nuanced,
because he rejected the generalised priority thesis, but believed in a rela-
tivised version of it. Furthermore, the philosophy of language he then devel-
oped considered thoughts to be abstract entities inhabiting a Platonic realm
of reality (the ‘third realm’). This latter idea provided a very simple, and
smooth, explanation of the objectivity, and communicability of thoughts, at
the cost of multiplying ontology.
As a matter of fact, the advantages connected with the view that thoughts
are abstract entities were undermined by the so-called ‘accessibility problem’:
22
Dummett (1993), Chapter 4, p. 27.

11
how are abstract entities, e.g. numbers, given to us? Frege offered a paradig-
matic, but not entirely satisfactory, solution of this problem in §62 of the
Foundations of Arithmetic setting an important example of how language
could be used to solve philosophical problems. And when, much later, in
the process of writing ‘Thoughts,’ Frege returned to this question, he did
not manage to go much beyond the use of suggestive metaphors (‘grasping a
thought’).
Certainly, as Dummett says, the priority thesis became an explicit, and
widely accepted, dogma of analytical philosophy by the time we come to the
Tractatus where Wittgenstein, famously, wrote:23

A thought is a proposition with sense.

However, in the Tractatus, not only do we find the explicit acceptance of the
priority thesis, but we also have the linguistic turn as the idea that the logical
analysis of language is the method that should be adopted to do philosophy
in a rigorous way:24

The [Tractatus] deals with the problems of philosophy, and

shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is
that the logic of our language is misunderstood.25

As we have seen in §4, the view that the apparent logical form of a
proposition P might not be its real one is due to Russell. And, therefore,
if, in following the philosophical causeway leading to the birth of analytical
philosophy, we intend to go from Frege to Wittgenstein, we need to use an
intermediate, and unavoidable, stepping stone represented by Russell’s diag-
nosis of the main cause behind the formation of pseudo-problems/paradoxes
in logic, and philosophy at large: the misunderstanding of the logical form
of certain propositions.
At this point of our critical discussion of Dummett’s rational reconstruc-
tion of some of the roots of analytical philosophy there is a question that
comes in full view as a consequence of the difficulties of the Fregean approach
to the philosophy of thought. This question is about whether it is necessary
to believe that thoughts are abstract entities, if we want to safeguard their
objectivity, and communicability.
As is well known, the later Wittgenstein, Quine, and others answered the
question above with a clear, and resounding, ‘No.’ And, as a consequence of
this, they decided to adopt an attitude to language and thought characterised
23
Wittgenstein (1921), §4, p. 19.
24
Wittgenstein (1921), Preface, p. 3.
25
The italics in the quotation are ours.

12
by a common anti Platonist stand. But, having established this much, it is
important to notice that whereas Wittgenstein’s strategy in fighting against
Platonist metaphysics aims at bringing words such as ‘knowledge,’ ‘being,’
‘object,’ ‘I,’ ‘proposition,’ etc. back from their metaphysical to their every
day use;26 Quine’s consists, instead, in an exhortation to study knowledge,
mind, and meaning ‘in the same empirical spirit that animates natural sci-
ence’ leaving no room for prior philosophy.27
It is matter of considerable historical interest to observe that both the
above mentioned anti Platonist strategies had important consequences in phi-
losophy. For Wittgenstein’s provided an ideal breeding ground for what, in
later years, became known as ordinary language philosophy; whereas Quine’s
fathered the still very influential philosophical naturalism.
Dummett shares Wittgenstein’s, and Quine’s, hostility to the involvement
of Platonist metaphysics in the philosophy of language/thought, but ends up
developing a view on how to secure the objectivity, and communicability, of
thoughts that differs from that of Wittgenstein, and from Quine’s.
To see this, consider that, for Dummett:28
If the approach to the philosophy of thought through the phi-
losophy of language is to serve the purpose of safeguarding the
objectivity of thought without a platonistic mythology, language
must be conceived as a social institution, as the common posses-
sion of the members of a community.
Indeed, if we believe, with the later Wittgenstein — for whom in most
cases meaning is use — that the meaning of an expression E belonging to
the common language is fixed by the public use that a competent member of
the community makes of E; and if, furthermore, we also share his belief that
26

When philosophers use a word — “knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”,

“proposition”, “name” — and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one
must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the
language-game which is its original home? What we do is to bring words
back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. [Wittgenstein (1983),
§116, p. 48e .]

27

[K]nowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they
have to do with, and [. . . ] are to be studied in the same empirical spirit
that animates natural science. There is no place for prior philosophy. [Quine
(1969a), p. 26.]

28
Dummett (1993), Chapter 13, §(vii), p. 147.

13
learning how to use E is the result of training based on the public, observ-
able practice of competent speakers (training might include positive/negative
feedback); it follows that it is not necessary to appeal to abstract entities, or
to goings on in our heads that are inaccessible to other speakers, to account
for the objectivity of the meaning of expressions belonging to the common
language.
Although Dummett is broadly sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s strategy
aimed at doing philosophy of language without Platonist metaphysics, what
he cannot bring himself to accept is the Wittgensteinian piecemeal view of
language as a collection of loosely related language games. For Dummett,
it is possible to produce a systematic theory of meaning that might account
not only for what it is for the expressions of the common language to have
the meaning that they do, but also clarify in what the individual speaker’s
understanding of such expressions — the individual’s idiolect — consists.29
A second point on which Wittgenstein and Dummett disagree is that,
whereas it seems that, for Wittgenstein, the mastery of a language collapses
on to the possession of practical abilities, for Dummett, instead, it involves
much more than that.
Dummett argues in favour of his thesis by focussing on an interesting
disanalogy between the two questions ‘Can you swim?’ and ‘Can you speak
Spanish?’. The disanalogy that interests Dummett becomes, immediately,
manifest, if we observe that someone could answer the first question by re-
plying ‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried,’ but not so the second.30
The appropriateness of replying ‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried’ to the first
question above shows, for Dummett, that swimming is a practical ability.
On the other hand, the absurdity of answering the question ‘Can you speak
Spanish?’ with ‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried’ is, according to him, evidence
in favour of the idea that there is much more to speaking a language than
the mere possession of a set of practical abilities.
Apart from a general hostility Dummett feels towards what we have called
‘philosophical naturalism,’ the main difference between his views on the phi-
29
Dummett (1993), Chapter 13, §(vii), p. 147:
[A] theory of meaning should first explain what it is for the expressions
of a common language such as Italian, English, Malay, etc., to have the
meanings that they do, and only then, by appeal to that explanation, go on
to explain in what an individual’s grasp of such a language may consist and
how it will affect the interpretation of his utterances and the ascription of
propositional attitudes to him.

30
‘ “Can you speak Spanish?” ‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried” ’ is part of a dialogue to
be found in P.G. Wodehouse, Ring for Jeeves.

14
losophy of language, and Quine’s, concerns the relationship between the idi-
olect and the common language. In Quine’s (and Davidson’s) philosophy of
language the idiolect has a primary rôle, whereas the common language is
nothing more than the overlapping of the various idiolects of the speakers. In
particular, the communication between speaker X and speaker Y is seen by
Quine as the result of translations from the idiolect of X into the idiolect of Y,
and vice versa. (For Davidson, instead, it is the result of interpretations.)31
However, the idea that Quine has of communication between two speak-
ers, and his view that there is no fact of the matter about meaning and
reference, taken together generate two formidable problems. These are the
well known problems of indeterminacy of translation, and inscrutability of
reference.32
In stark contrast with the views of Quine (and Davidson) on this mat-
ter, according to Dummett, the common language is primary, whereas the
idiolect is seen by him simply as the individual’s (partial) understanding of
the common language. Within a Dummettian frame of reference, the com-
munication between speakers X and Y has nothing to do with translating
or interpreting (in Davidson’s sense). It is a dialogue guided by the objec-
tive golden standard provided by the common language, objective golden
standard whose nature is neither psychological nor abstract.
It is important to notice that, within a Dummettian view of language,
as a consequence of the existence of an objective golden standard provided
by the common language, we could not have anomalies affecting communi-
cation such as indeterminacy of translation, and inscrutability of reference.
Furthermore, there would be no danger of veering into psychologism either
as there is, instead, within a Quinean framework of communication where
speaker X, lacking the golden standard provided by the common language,
must ‘read the mind’ of speaker Y to produce a theory about how speaker Y
is going to take the things that he is about to say, and vice versa.33
But, now, independently of the great interest of Dummett’s discussion
of the relationship between language and thought, it seems to us that an
important problem has been left unresolved. This is a problem that has
to do with something we touched upon in §5: the phenomenon known as
seeing-as.
31
See on this Davidson (1986), Radical Interpretation, Essay 9, Radical Interpretation,
pp. 125–139.
32
See on this Quine (1969a), and Davidson (1986), Language and Reality, Essay 16, The
Inscrutability of Reference, pp. 227–241.
33
On the debate between Dummett and Davidson on the priority of idiolect over common
language see Davidson (1994) and Dummett (1994).

15
7 Proto-thoughts and philosophical natural-
ism
The car driver that takes the decision to stop when red shows on what he sees
as traffic lights, attends to other things that he sees as pedestrians crossing
the road, etc., while having a heated conversation about Brexit with the
passengers in his car is, clearly, exercising some of his perceptions, attention,
consciousness, and ability to judge.
However, this intense mental activity, that runs parallel to the political
conversation, is certainly not taking place in language, because the ‘linguistic
medium’ of the driver is already hosting considerations, thoughts, etc. relat-
ing to other matters. We can easily conjecture that thoughts about driving
the car, etc. are ‘realised’ in a non-linguistic medium of the driver that con-
sists of the set of ‘multi media’ representations — images, sounds, smells,
etc. — that he has of the environment, and that he relates to one another
in a rational, but non-linguistic mode.
Note that an activity of seeing-as, attending to, reasoning, etc. taking
place within a non-linguistic medium, similar to the one described above,
is what probably accounts for the presence of intelligent behaviour in some
animals who do not have language. For certain animals without language,
very much like humans, see their environment as what affords34 them food,
shelter, mates; solve problems; decide what to do in certain circumstances;
etc.
Of course, an important disanalogy between the car driver example above
and the behaviour of intelligent animals without language is that whereas
the car driver has been taught how to drive a car by means of, among other
things, language, the animal not in possession of language has learned, for
example, to run around big rocks, rather than through them, via conscious
experience deployed within a non-linguistic medium.
Although the considerations just made should prompt us to refrain from
too quickly attributing an intelligent, non-linguistic, behaviour to our car
driver, it seems to us that, first, it is undeniable that some animals without
language engage in seeing-as, together with the correlative thoughts, etc.;
and, secondly, that the only thing shown by the disanalogy above is that lin-
guistic training can condition intelligent behaviour taking place in a medium
that differs from language.
With regard to the second point above, a similar phenomenon to that de-
scribed there takes place when we write a computer programme. To see this
consider that the chess programme, which belongs to (has been produced
34
See on this Gibson (1986).

16
within) a medium of conscious cognitive agents, a medium made, among
other things, of meanings, reasons, ends, and emotions, affects that concrete
universal Turing machine we call ‘computer’ in such a way that its ‘cir-
cuitry,’ which inhabits a medium entirely governed by/reducible to the laws
of physics, is able to implement logical operations to the point of playing
chess at extremely high standards.
At this stage of the present discussion it seems to us that, if what we have
been arguing so far is correct, the priority thesis cannot be right. For, since
the medium of seeing-as, and of the multitude of non-linguistic reasonings,
etc. connected with it, is not language, there is little that a theory of language
can say about the theory of non-linguistic thoughts accompanying seeing-as.
Dummett is aware of the threat to the priority thesis posed by seeing-as,
and the cohort of intelligent non-linguistic activity surrounding it. And his re-
action to this threat consists in relegating non-linguistically ‘borne’ thoughts
to the rank of proto-thoughts, salvaging in this way the priority thesis at the
cost of restricting its range of application to full-fledged thoughts. He justi-
fies his strategy of intervention in support of the priority thesis by arguing
that a:35

Proto-thought is distinguished from [a] full-fledged thought,

as engaged in by human beings for whom language is its vehi-
cle, by its incapacity for detachment from present activity and
circumstances.

What Dummett means here is that, if you, for example, represent in the
usual notation a chess problem displayed on your chessboard, you can ‘carry
the problem with you’ wherever you like and work on it, independently of
the physical presence of the actual chessboard and chessmen exemplifying it.
You can tell other people about it by e-mail, over the phone, etc. without
reproducing the ‘present activity and circumstances’ relating to it. On the
other hand, the proto-thoughts of an animal without language (or of a hu-
man) are not, as it were, in a ‘portable format.’ They are part and parcel of
the ‘present activity and circumstances.’
But, even granting all that Dummett wants to say about proto-thoughts
— that they are not detachable from present activity and circumstances; in-
volve the use of proto-concepts; or that, perhaps, express some non-conceptual
content, etc. — we feel that their challenge to the priority thesis remains
undiminished, because they are thoughts anyway, and a theory of language
is unable to provide useful information about their structure, etc.
35
See Dummett (1993), Chapter 12 Proto-Thoughts, pp. 122-123.

17
 Furthermore, once language is out of consideration, it is only experimen-
tal psychology — together, perhaps, with the collaborative support of the
cognitive sciences — what can cast some light on seeing-as, and the other
connected phenomena relevant to our present discussion. And, this would,
of course, imply that we should admit to our discussion on how to produce a
theory of thought not only the empirical sciences, but also their unwelcome
philosophical counterpart: naturalism.
Now, in bringing this Prologue to a close, it is our most sincere hope that
our effort might help the interested reader to appreciate Dummett’s attempt
to clarify some of the main features of the school of thought to which he has
contributed throughout his life.
The task that Dummett set himself to accomplish in his book is very
difficult, because it presupposes the ability to survey critically his own way
of doing philosophy. However, in spite of that, he managed to produce a
masterful overview of analytical philosophy that is, as usual, both deep and
stimulating.
As we have already remarked elsewhere in this Prologue, the fairness of
Dummett’s approach is present, right from the beginning, in the very title
of his work, where he explicitly warns the reader against any expectation of
completeness to be found in it.
Do we agree with everything Dummett says in his book? No, we don’t.
But, at the same time, we strongly believe that Origins of Analytical Philos-
ophy will prove to be an invaluable reading for all those who are interested
in gaining a powerful eagle’s eye view of one of the most important school of
philosophy of the XXth century.

References
Bonomi, A. (ed.): 1973, La struttura logica del linguaggio, Valentino Bom-
piani, Milano.
Bynum, T.W. (ed. & transl.): 1972, Gottlob Frege: Conceptual Notation and
related articles, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Davidson, D.: 1986, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Clarendon
Press, Oxford.
Davidson, D.: 1994, ‘The Social Aspect of Language,’ in McGuinness (1994),
pp. 1–16.
Descartes, R.: 1684 (1988), Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in Descartes
(1988), vo. I, pp. 7–78.

18
Descartes, R.: 1988, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, transl. by J.
Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, vol. I & II, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.

Dummett, M.A.E.: 1991, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, Duckworth, Lon-

don.

Dummett, M.A.E.: 1993, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard Univer-

sity Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dummett, M.A.E.: 1994, ‘Reply to Davidson,’ in McGuinness (1994), pp.

257–267.

Evans, G.: 1982, The Varieties of Reference, edited by J. McDowell, Oxford

University Press, Oxford.

Frege, G.: 1879, Begriffsschrift, a formula language, modeled upon that of

arithmetic, for pure thought, in van Heijenoort (1967), pp. 1–82.

Frege, G.: 1884 (1989), The Foundations of Arithmetic, transl. by J. L.

Austin, Second Revised Edition, B. Blackwell, Oxford.

Frege, G.: 1972, ‘On the aim of the “Conceptual Notation”’, in Bynum
(1972).

Frege, G.: 1973, ‘Senso e Denotazione’, in Bonomi (1973), pp. 9–32.

Frege, G.: 1977, Logical Investigations, P. T. Geach editor, B. Blackwell,

Oxford.

Frege, G.: 1977a, ‘Thoughts’, in Frege (1977), pp. 1–30.

Frege, G.: 1979a, Posthumous Writings, H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, F.

Kaulbach (ed.s), transl. by P. Long and R. White, B. Blackwell, Oxford.

Frege, G.: 1979b, ‘Sources of knowledge of mathematics and the mathemat-

ical natural sciences,’ in Frege (1979a), pp. 267–274.

Frege, G.: 1979c, ‘Notes for Ludwig Darmstaedter,’ in Frege (1979a), pp.
253–257.

Gibson, J.J.: 1994, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Psychol-

ogy Press, New York.

McGuinness, B. & Oliveri, G. (ed.s): 1994, The Philosophy of Michael Dum-

mett, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.

19
 Oliveri, G.: 1988, The Principles of Analytical Philosophy, D.PHIL. disser-
tation, University of Oxford.

Oliveri, G.: 2015, Bertrand Russell, APhEx, n. 12, pp. 1–49.

Quine, W. V.: 1969a, ‘Ontological Relativity’, in Quine (1969), pp. 26–68.

Quine, W. V.: 1969, Ontological Relativity & other essays, Columbia Uni-
versity Press, New York.

Russell, B.: 1908, ‘Mathematical logic as based on the theory of types,’ in

van Heijenoort (1967), pp. 150–182.

van Heijenoort, J. (ed.): 1967, From Frege to Gödel, Harvard University

Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Wittgenstein, L.: 1981 (1921), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, transl. by

D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness, with the introduction by B. Russell, Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, London & Henley.

Wittgenstein, L.: 1983, Philosophical Investigations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Wodehouse, P.G.: 2008, Ring for Jeeves, Arrow Books.

20

View publication stats