Antirrealismo PDF

Philosophical Znuestigafions 19:1 January 1996
ISSN 0190-0536
An Anti-Realist Perspective on Language,

Thought, Logic and the History of Analytic
Philosophy: An Interview with Michael
Dummett
Fabrice Pataut, bistitut dHistoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et

des Techniques, Urziverszti de Paris
1. Frege and Wittgenstein
Fabrice Pataut: You are one of the most prominent philosophers in

the analytic tradition, and you have devoted much of your time to
the study of Frege who started that tradition a little more than a
century ago. It is rather unusual to proceed in this way among ana-
lytic philosophers. People do not tend to worry so much about
what authors have actually said. They usually deal with the topics, as
it were, directly; or at least a great number of them want to do that.
You said, in the Preface to the second edition of Frege: Philosophy of
Language, that until agreement is reached concerning the basic con-
tent of Freges doctrines, a fruitful discussion of these doctrines must
be postponed.2 Now, in a sense, a great part of philosophy as it is
practised in the analytic tradition consists in a dlscussion of these
doctrines and it doesnt seem that any agreement has been reached
yet as to what their right interpretation amounts to, let alone any
agreement on the principles of the exegesis of Freges philosophy.
Let me begin with a deliberately nahe question: What is so peculiar
in Freges case? What are we to make of the fact that no agreement
1. The interview took place in Oxford on 10 September 1992. While working

from the tape on the text of the interview, I decided to gather references to books
and articles in footnotes so that the reader may have a sense of the flow of the con-
versation. I then dwided the text into sections, accordmg to the topics which were
discussed. Some materiai has been edited &om the original transcript. I must thank
Michael Dunlmett for his patience, and both he and Anne Dummett for their kmd
hospitahty. Timothy Tessin assisted in preparation of the typescript for publication.
2. Frege: Philosophy o j Language, Duckworth, London, 1st ed., 1973; Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2nd ed., 1981, p. xv.
0 Blackwell Pubhrhen I.td 19Yh. 1 0 X Cowley Road. Oxford OX14 IJF, UK and 238 Maan Suect. Cambridge,
MA 02142. USA.
2 Philosophical Investigations
has been reached concerning the basic content of Freges doctrines?
There are wide disagreements concerning them and yet one can
picture analytic philosophy as a constant reworkmg and discussion of
what Frege started with, as an attempt to solve his puzzles.
Michael Dummett: I think thats true. The last remark you made has
a great deal of truth in it because Frege succeeded in formulating
questions in a way that we can still respond to. When you study
philosophers of the past, in almost all instances, you first have to
reformulate their problems before discussing them. With Frege, they
are already formulated in a way we feel congenial to us. We have not
moved so far as to find his formulations misleadmg. Of course there
are things that Frege did not see or was not aware of and that we have
become aware of. But he remains an extremely good starting point,
in my opinion, for a great many lines of philosophical problems.
The phenomenon that you talk about was one that surprised me
and still surprises me somewhat. When I wrote my first book on
Frege, I didnt think there was much room for controversy about
what he meant.3 I thought you needed to reflect a good deal on it,
but, principally, not so much to determine what he meant as to go
deeply into the question and see all the implications. And then I was
amazed by reading a number of things - book, articles, and so on -
which proposed radically new interpretations of Frege, most of
which seemed to me to be perverse. And I cant fully explain this
phenomenon. The sentence you quoted, I suppose, was probably
written in a mood of irritation.
FP It was a rather r a d d way of putting it, to say the least.
MD. Yes, thats right, and I wont stand by it. Of course we can
&scuss Frege before we reach total agreement. But it is just very
irritating. And this simply goes on. There are a number of books
which are exercises in saying Well, youve always misunderstood
Frege before me. I think its foolish. I just dont think that could be
true. People can of course see things that others havent seen. But
the idea that everybody has got it completely wrong up to this
moment as to what he really meant . . . . Thats just too improbable
to be entertained. But people go on. I dont know why Frege par-
ticularly attracts this. People dont do it with Russell. They dont
even do it with Kant, right?
3. Frege: Philosophy of Language was followed by: The Interpretation of Freges
Philosophy, Duckworth, London, 1981; Frege and Other Philosophers, Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1991; and Frege: Philosophy ofMafhematics, Duckworth, London, 1991.
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Fabrice Pataut 3
FP They do it with Wittgenstein. He seems to attract this sort of
thing in particular.
MD: Thats perfectly true. But then, Wittgenstein is much more
obscure than Frege, because of the way he wrote. He often left the
reader to see the point.
FP A lot of Wittgensteins remarks are open to interpretation.
There are many sentences and paragraphs which seem to contain
disconnected remarks.
MD: And questions left unanswered, and so forth. You have to
ask: Why does this paragraph come at this point? Why did he put
that in there? So I think thats more understandable. I also think
that were quite a long way from fully understanding Wittgenstein.
So perhaps in such arguments the truth will emerge, but I dont
think that there is room for arguments of that lund in the case of
Frege. Certainly, there is room for arguments about the evaluation
of his doctrines. But what they were seems to me pretty clear.
F P That leads me to another question concerning Wittgenstein.
You have said that you started your philosophical career thinlung of
yourself as a follower of Wittgenstein, at least until 1960.4 I have
three questions about this. To begin with, what did it mean for you
at the time to be a follower of Wittgenstein? Secondly, &d you
embark on your life-long study of Frege adopting a particular philo-
sophical perspective one could call Wittgensteinian? Finally, &d you
conceive what one might call your Frege-work, as opposed to your
case against realism, as an endeavour entirely distinct from your own
philosophical perspective?
M D Obviously I did embark on the study of Frege adopting a
philosophical perspective because no one comes to any philosophi-
cal writer without some preconception of his own. But certainly not
consciously in the sense in which one could say: Now I am going
to look at Frege fiom the standpoint of Wittgenstein, or anything
like that. I didnt see it as separate, and indeed it hasnt been separate
for me precisely because Freges questions, to a large extent, are
questions. The study of Freges work has been for me very much of a
starting point for thinlung about various philosophical questions. O f
course, when you write about a particular writer, you have to do a
good deal of exposition and so on, but as you know, especially in
the first book, I tried to make that a platform for going on to discuss
4. Tmth and Other Enigmas, Harvard University Press, Carnbndge, Mass., 1978, p.
xii.
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a range of philosophical questions. Theres a lot in that first book
that isnt really about Frege at all, but it just started from there.
FZ? That was one of Hans Slugas complaints.
MI): It was one of his complaints, and I have to admit that there
was some justice in them, although I disagree with some of the
details. I dont think that the l n d of historical background that he
tried to build for Frege was at all convincing. But its perfectly true
that when I wrote that first book, I wasnt thinlng nearly enough
about the situation in which Frege himselfwas. I thnk you have to.
I was thinking much more about the links between his work and
what happened subsequently. I think you do have to ask yourself,
when you read a philosopher: How dld the problem look at the
time, given the sort of things that other people were saying then?
FZ? With respect to Frege and Wittgenstein, you have said that
Wittgensteins conception of the social character of meaning, of
meaning as use, was foreshadowed by Freges idea of the objectivity
of Sinn. Isnt that a way of looking at Frege from some sort of
Wittgensteinian point of view?
MI): Im not sure. The emphasis is very strongly there in Frege
on the communicability of thoughts, of Gedanken, and on the fact
that they are common to us all.
Fl? And this stands in firm opposition to the incommunicability
of representations, of Vorstellungen.
MI): Right. Now there isnt, in Wittgenstein, the same kind of
rejection of the idea of the incommunicability of the inner mental
life. What you could say about Frege is that there is this emphasis on
the communicability of something accessible to everyone, but there
isnt any detailed exploration of it. He doesnt at all discuss how it is
that we can all attach the same sense to our sentences.
FZ? He gives no explanation of what the actual grasping of
thoughts consists in either. There is, as it were, the bare act of grasp-
ing.
MD. Right. Its just a fact.
Fl? So do you think that Wittgensteins idea is a way of cashng
out Freges intuition?
5. Hans Sluga, Gottlob Frege, Koutledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1980.
6. What is a Theory of Meaning? (II), Tnrth arid Meaning - Essays in Semantics, G.
Evans and J. McDowell, eds., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976, p. 135: Freges thesis
that sense is objective is thus implicitly an anticipation (in respect of that aspect of
meaning which constitutes sense) of Wittgensteins doctrine that meaning is use (or
of one of the family of doctrines so expressed) [. . .I.
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Fabrice Pataut 5
MD: I think you could certainly see it that way. Its very difficult
to know. Obviously, he was deeply influenced by Frege. He seems
to me usually at his worst when hes directly criticising Frege. Not
because Frege was always right and Wittgenstein was always wrong,
but just because hes rather crude when hes critical of Frege. I dont
know why. Obviously, a great deal of influence doesnt show on the
surface. Hes not always explicitly referring to Frege and hes not
always acknowledging him when he should. I think that, probably,
the genesis of those ideas may have been through reading Frege. I
dont know for sure.
FP: There is another point in your reading of Frege which is
quite remarkable: the emphasis on Freges idea that to understand
the meaning of a sentence, i.e. the thought expressed by a sentence,
is to know it truth-conhtions, or whether or not these conditions
are fulfilled. Unless I am mistaken, Frege explicitly advocates this
conception only once, namely in Grundgesetze, s32.7 But you see in
this particular point one of the cornerstones of Freges realism, and
your own argumentation against realism is indccd explicitly directed
against the so-called truth-conditional theory of meaning. Do you
think this actually was a central concern of Freges?
MD: Absolutely. I think it relates very closely to his opposition to
the intrusion of psychology into logic. Just consider the things he
says in the Grundlugen about psychologistic definitions.8 When you
cant think of how to define a basic mathematical concept, you
define it in terms of the mental operations needed to grasp the con-
cept. What he says about this is: you cant use such a definition to
prove anything. I agree that the remark is not drectly about truth-
conhtions. But just think about it: When can you use a definition to
prove something? Precisely, when it tells you under what conditions
7 . Gottlob Frege, Grundgesctre der Arithmetik, Begnfschriitlich abgeleitet, Band I, H .
Pohle, Jena, 1893. English translation by M. Furth, of the Preface, Introduction, and
SS1-52 in: Tke Basic Laws of Aritlzmetic: Exposition .f the System, University of
California Press, Los Angeles, 1964. Here is the relevant text by Frege: Every (. . .]
name of a truth-value expresses a sense, a thought [driickt einen Sinn, einen Cedanken
aus]. Namely, by our stipulations, it is determined under what conditions
[Bedingungen] the name denotes [bedeutc] the True. The sense of this name - the
thought - is the thought that these conditions are fulfilled [deb diese Bedingungen efiillt
sindl.
8. Gottlob Frege, Die Cnrndlagen dcr Arithmetik. Eine logisch-mathematische
Untersuckung iiber den Begnf der Zahl, W . Koebner, Breslau, 1884. English translarion
by J.L. Austin: The Foundations ofArithmetir - A logico-mathematical enquiry into the con-
cept of number, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1950. See in particular, Introduction, pp. iii,
vi, viiic-ixe, and Part 11, SS26, 17.
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a sentence involving the defined term would be true. If it does that,
or if it helps to do that, then you are able to use it to prove that
some particular sentence is true. This is why I think it is fundamen-
tal to Frege.
Youve just talked about the realism vs. anti-realism issue. What is
very noticeable about Frege is that he always guards himself against
saying that truth-conditions have to do with the way in which we
recogruse the truth-value. Very often, there is an actual caveat. For
example, when he is claiming that predicates should always be
defined and that it should always be determined, for any object,
whether it f d s under the concept or not. And he usually adds: we
may not be able to determine it although it is, as it were, objectively
determined. Reality determines it; something like that. So the
rehsal to take this in the terms in which Wittgenstein would actu-
ally have taken it - in terms of what we can do - is actually quite
conscious.
2. Inconsistency, Holism, Harmony and Intuitionism
FP: Let me go back to Wittgenstein. My next question concerns

how one should read the famous motto Meaning is use and deter-
mine what its philosophical implications may be.9 This is a big
problem and it has to do, once again, with the idea of being a
Wittgensteinian vs. not being a Wittgensteinian, in the following
sense. A lot of people feel that no interpretation of Wittgensteins
famous motto could ever lead, as you claim it does, to a revision of
the laws of classical logic. Im not talking here about people solely
concerned with what Wittgenstein really meant. It seems to me that
a lot of people want to resist the idea that something so obvious, in
a way, as Meaning is use could lead to something that drastic. Why
do you think it does?
M D Ill try an answer. Fundamentally, because I dont accept
holism, in a way that I think Wittgenstein did or at least was com-
9. See Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, Enghsh
translation by G.E.M. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1958, Part I, $43: For a
large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning,
it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language p i e
Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache]. See also Philosophical
Invextigations, Part I, 9120, 138, 190, 432, and also the opening pages of The Blue
and Brown Books, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1958.
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Fabrice Pataut 7
mitted to. You know Wittgensteins famous view that philosophy
cant alter anything at all, can only describe, etc. . . . . In particular,
he had the idea that you cant alter linguistic practice, and he got
himself into the absurdity that philosophy couldnt alter linguistic
practice even if that practice was shown to be inconsistent or led to
a contradiction. You just have to accept contradictions as a fact.
Fl? But our linguistic practice certainly could be inconsistent.
MD: Tarslu believed that it was, essentially.
Fl? Actual linguistic practice is often inconsistent.
MD: Well, actual linguistic practice. . . . What does one exactly
mean by that? It certainly couldnt be part of a practice that people
just assert contradictions. If you want to say that a practice is contra-
mctory, you have to say that there are general principles which
people follow and could acknowledge as such. I mean by that, that
they could acknowledge that they follow these principles. If we
pressed them, they would also acknowledge which ones lead to
contradictions. The point is that we could press them to do so.
Fl? So people do contradict themselves. Isnt that a practice?
Why not just say that they are engaged in the practice of contramc-
tion?
MD: You could say that. But then you have to qualift your state-
ment and recognise that they can also acknowledge that what they
have said requires some revision. There is a distinction between an
individual contradicting himself and who would acknowledge the
error and its source, and the language itregbeing inconsistent, which
is what worried Tarski about natural languages. Which means that
there are general principles governing the use of the language which
everyone would acknowledge and which are such that people, if
pressed, would recognise that they led them to a contradlction.
Thats what paradoxes are. When they are faced with paradoxes,
people dont know what to do because theyve been led to a contra-
diction by steps that seemed absolutely compelling. So they just
march away from it. O f course, then, philosophers start to worry
about it.
The important point in our discussion of holism is this:
Wittgenstein thought - and I utterly disagree with this view - that
nothing in linguistic practice and in particular in the use of forms of
inference, requires justification or can be criticised. If its the prac-
tice that is absurd, then thats enough justification. It doesnt need
any further justification. Now, it seems to me that that is wrong
8 Blackwell Publishen Ltd. 1996
because inferences arent things set aside from the rest of language.
An inference isnt just a game like a crossword puzzle which doesnt
affect anything else. It leads to assertions and conclusions, and those
conclusions may contain logical constants. So you have to ask:
How are they used? How do we react to such assertions? What
consequences should we draw from them? and so on.
It seems to me that there is the possibility of a mismatch between
the way we reason and the way we use the conclusions we arrive at
by reasoning. A reasoning process has to be justified on the grounds
that it leads to things that we are justified in asserting according to
the meanings we attach to them.
FP And in particular, to the meaning we attach to the logical
constants?
MD: Right. So theres a requirement of consonance, as it were,
between different parts of a linguistic practice, which is something
extremely complicated and which doesnt entitle us to say: Well, we
just reason that way, thats what we call reasoning and thats it.
FP So its the harmony requirement that imposes the rejection of
holism and which forces on us the reading of Meaning is use as
leading to a revision of certain patterns of reasoning, such as the
ones based on the laws of classical logic. Thats very uta-
Wittgensteinian.
MD: Thats the respect in which I completely diverge from
Wittgenstein. I dont think there ever was any justification in his
saying that philosophy cant interfere with anything. Our linguistic
practice can be out of order just as our behaviour can be out of
order or irrational. Philosophy has the right to point that out.
FP Do you thmk that classical patterns of reasoning and laws of
classical logic are actually inconsistent and lead to contradlctions?
MD: I dont think theyre inconsistent quite. I dont think they
lead to anything as bad as contradiction. I think they do or can lead
to the dsharmony you were talkmg about. By using certain patterns
of inference, were led to assert things that we actually arent enti-
tled to assert, given the meanings we attach to our words.
FP Let us look at a standard case. Suppose someone uses the rule
of double negation elimination, i.e. infers p &om 1-p. An intuition-
ist will reject his inference as invalid. But whats wrong with the use
of this logical law? It must be that we cant assert p on the basis of
1-p. But why cant l l p constitute sufficient ground for p?
MD. Its not sufficient ground in itself: Of course, there are many
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Fabrice Pataut 9
cases where thats perfectly alright, and those cases include all those
in which we could actually decide the matter. But in general, when
it is something that we dont have the means to decide, then there is
a problem. It all depends on how you understand negation. If, as we
naturally do, you understand it in such a way that it is sufficient, in
order for you to assert the negation of a sentence p , to show that
you couldnt be in a position to assert p , then the fact that you
couldnt be in a position to assert the negation itself certainly does
not guarantee that youre in a position to assert that very sentence p .
FP: But this would constitute a sufficient ground for assertion if
we could indeed determine the truth-value of p?
MD: Right, otherwise you simply get something weaker. The
illusion comes from a picture we have of a determinate reality
which we may not be able to observe but which must nevertheless
be fixed one way or the other. It isnt false? Well then, it must be
true. Its simple. Its a psychologcally compelling picture that we
use.
Look, this hasnt exactly to do with rules of inference, but it has
very much to do with realistic pictures. There is an enormously
prevalent belief in determinism. Im not going to talk about quan-
tum mechanics. Thats another problem. I mean, its just another
reason why people shouldnt believe in determinism. But forget
about quantum mechanics. Just think about chaotic systems. Ive
been told by deterministic chaotic systems advocates that if you had
the initial conditions precisely, then the subsequent states of that sys-
tem would be completely determined. The trouble is: we cant
predict them because we cant ever have the initial conditions pre-
cisely, and a small variation will produce a large variation later. So
they claim that its unpredictable but nevertheless deterministic.
Now, to talk about the system being deterministic is just to
assume that there are precise values of the initial conditions of the
quantities, given by real numbers. But that just amounts t o the
imposition of a kmd of mathematical picture - of the mathematical
continuum - on reality, which actually doesnt fit our experience at
all. Everybody is constantly remarlung that when we measure, we
only measure up to a certain degree of accuracy, and so on. If you
dont assume that these quantities have, in that sense, absolutely
determined magnitudes to start with, you havent got any remaining
ground for determinism. To say that the system is deterministic is
just a remark about the mathematics.
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FP: Its just, as it were, a feature of the mathematics.
MD: Thats right. The underlying assumption is that all these
quantities have absolutely determinate magmtudes given by real
numbers.
FP: Thats what the so-called hidden value theory partially
amounts to.
MD: Exactly. And its just something imposed by this way of
thinlung.
Fl? That was Einsteins view.
M D But that was in response to some specific problems with
quantum mechanics. Im not talkmg about that. Most physicists, of
course, accept the classical continuum as a good model of physical
reality, but I think they would do much better if they used the intu-
itionistic continuum. Youre always progressing towards, but never
arrive at determinate values.
FP: Let us talk about Wittgenstein and the relation between
Wittgenstein and intuitionism. One thing that people dont like
about intuitionism is the sort of subjectivist or even solipsist ,philoso-
phy that goes with it, or that Brouwers intuitionism was committed
to. Do you thnk that the Wittgensteinian outlook on the social
character of meaning provides a way out of it? Suppose that
Meaning is use does indeed lead to a revision of classical logc. If
we accept that interpretation of that part of Wittgensteins later p h -
losophy, do we really pull intuitionism out of solipsism, out of the
sort of subjectivism it is usually associated with?
MD: I think so. Of course, Brouwer does appear to have been a
genuine solipsist. I think he actually didnt believe in other people.
Take as an example the supposed sense-datum language, which is
itself a solipsistic language. If there were such a language, you would
have to do an enormous amount of work to go from there to the
physical object-language. But the mathematical case is quite dffer-
ent. The contrast with mathematics is strikmg and Brouwer, of
course, is completely wrong about the incommunicability of mathe-
matical structures. What is striking about mathematics is precisely its
communicability. There isnt anything in a mathematical idea that
cant be communicated. The most amazing thing about it is that you
dont have to do anything, in the sense that, if you have a descrip-
tion of a mathematical theory in terms of the constructions that the
individual mathematician makes in his mind, you have to do virtu-
ally nothing to transform that into a description of the constructions
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Fabrice Pataut 11
that can be communicated from one mathematician to another.

Why? Because Brouwers theory can be converted, without any
change except in the background matter, into a theory of, as it
were, communal mathematics. It couldnt happen in any other
realm of discourse. In the case of the physical world, theres going to
be an enormous gap between the world we all inhabit and the world
I observe. But in the mathematical case, theres no such gap and
thats why the solipsism, which I absolutely agree was part of
Brouwers overall philosophy and motivated it, doesnt actually mat-
ter.
3. Austin, Ryle and Carnap
Fl? May I go back to Wittgenstein? You said in the Preface to Truth

and Other Enigmas that the sort of work that Wittgenstein did - at
least, I guess, in Philosophical Investigations - inoculated you against
the influence of Austin. H o w do you think that Wittgensteins work
helps against Austins paradigm case type of argumentation and
deliberately unsystematic ways of dealing with language, i.e. against
the ordmary language philosophy which dominated Oxford at one
point? Moreover, do you think that analytic philosophy should or
could be systematic?
MD: The remark I made about Austin was just an historical
remark, as it were, about myself. Its true that this opposition to sys-
tem is common to Wittgenstein and Austinian ordinary language
philosophy; the idea that you have to deal with things piecemeal,
and so on. But what I think the big difference between
Wittgenstein and at least what Austin professed, or what he taught,
was that Wittgenstein always began with philosophical problems and
wrestled with them, whereas Austin thought they were due to con-
fusions, misunderstandlngs about our own language, things that go
wrong with language.
Wittgenstein certainly thought, like Austin, that it had very much
to do with language. But he started with the problems, whereas
Austin actually taught - I dont know whether it is true of his own
practice - that we must forget about philosophical problems. We
must start by loolung at words and at how theyre used, make very
10. p. xii.
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precise analyses of these, and so on, regardless of what philosophical
problems there are, and then there will be a miracle and all philo-
sophical problems will dissolve. This is what mostly seemed to me
so destructive of philosophical reflection as I understood it. The
motivation of the whole activity comes from the perplexities that
you get into when you start thinking about human wdl, or time, or
anything. And to teach people to look away from them, well. . . .
Fl? There is another tradition in analytic philosophy. I am think-
ing about the influence of Carnap in the United States. Carnap was
a systematic philosopher and he had an enormous influence on
Reichenbach, Quine, Goodman, Putnam, etc. There are whole
generations of American philosophers who took philosophy to be
what Carnap thought it was or who took him as a model, and for
Carnap the business of philosophy was the construction of a system.
Do you think that he was closer to the correct view of what a
philosophical enterprise should be? Of course, he barely had any
influence over here.
MD: And thats because of Ryle. Just one last thing about Austin.
I always thought that Austin was blind on the topic of philosophical
reflection. He was a very clever man, but I always thought his
influence was extremely bad. As for Ryle, I didnt have that view of
him. I gradually came to that view, but I didnt at the time. On the
contrary, I believed, or probably believed, a lot of what Ryle said.
He was dead against Carnap. He regarded Carnap as the worst
philosopher, as making trivial mistakes, and for that reason it was a
long time before I really read any Carnap and took him seriously at
all. I have grown up, as it were, studying philosophy at Oxford
when Ryle was the lung. He had a tremendous influence. Austin
came a bit later. I thought I knew that there was no need to pay any
attention to Carnap, simply because Ryle said we shouldnt and
made fun of him. So its quite different for me than it is for those
people for whom Carnap was the great authority.
Fl? One just needs to consider his influence on Quine and
Goodman.
M D Thats true. The Structure of Appearance, which was
Goodmans first book, was an effort, an attempt, to do the same
work as the logische A u t a u . I thought, and actually still think, that
this is a wholly misguided enterprise. I think that Wittgensteins
11. Rudolph Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Weltkreis-Verlag, Berlin, 1928;
English translation by R.A. Berkeley: The hgical Construction of the World,
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Fabrice Pataut 13
view that there arent any philosophical theses that philosophy can
actually say, and that all it can do is remind you of things that you
know well already, is wrong. There are theories to be constructed.
But Im not very impressed by the actual theories of Carnap. There
is something very sterile about them. So, to me, Quines revolt is
very intelligible.
How should I put it? Do you know the story about the Irishman?
Someone has lost his way and asks an Irishman: How do I get to
Dublin? The Irishman thinks for a bit and says: If I was going to
Dublin, I shouldnt start from here. It seems to me it was rather a
pity to start from Carnap.
FP: That may be true, but there are many worries to be found in
Carnap - for instance in the long article Testability and Meaning -
which are actually very close to the sort of things you are worried
about.121m thinlung in particular of the verifiability theory of
meaning and of the way in which he tries to amend it and to replace
the notion of verification with the more respectable notion of grad-
ual confirmation understood in probabilistic terms. Im also thinking
of his rejection of the naive idea that unverifiable statements have
no meaning, a sure sign that something was wrong with the original
positivist criterion of meaningfulness or cognitive meaning. AU these
concerns are very close to the fundamental issues of the realism us.
anti-reahsm debate as you conceive it.
M D Thats probably true. It must be a lingering effect of Ryles
teaching that I havent paid any attention to Carnap.
4.Analytic Phlosophy, its History and the Priority Thesis
FP: Lets leave Carnap on the side then. Let me switch to another
question. Recently, youve shown some interest in the history of
philosophy. You claim, at the very beginning of Origins ofAnulyticuf
Philosophy, that analytical philosophy must understand its own
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1967. Nelson Goodman, The Structure of

Appearance, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1951. See Dummetts
review of the latter in Truth and Other Enigmas, ch. 3, pp. 29-37.
12. Rudolph Carnap, Testability and Meaning, Philosophy o j Science, vol. 3 (Oct.
1936). pp. 419-71 [sec. 1-1111; vol. 4 (Jan. 1937). pp. 1-40 [sec. IV].
0 Blackwcll Puhliberr Ltd. 1996
hi~tory.~ I guess that this was prompted by Slugas complaints about
your first book.
MD: Possibly, yes. Indirectly. That is to say: Slugas remarks d d
after a bit convince me that I hadnt paid enough attention to the
hstorical background. But then, as I already said, I wasnt very
impressed by his own. In particular, I was deeply unimpressed by his
refusal to pay any attention to Husserl. In that book on Frege, he
says that it should be interesting to make a comparison between the
two but that its beyond the scope of the book. It seems to me that
if youre going to write a book about Frege and his historical set-
ting, thats precisely what you should do. There is nothing very
hitful in all that stuff about Lotze and so on.
But it wasnt just in response to Sluga. It was also because of
Herman Philipse, a Dutch philosopher who happened to be in
Oxford in 1982 or 1983 and wanted to give a seminar on Husserls
Logical Investigations. He contacted me, partly I think, because he was
just a visitor and didnt know whether anyone would come if he
gave a seminar, or whether or not he was really allowed to do so. I
offered to give it with him. As a result, of course, I started to read a
lot of the Investigations and got rather interested. So it was a combi-
nation. The other motivation was to answer the questions that Sluga
had failed to answer.
FP What is the philosophical interest of an understanding of that
type, an understandng of the history of analytic philosophy, besides
the general historical or cultural interest? The vast majority of ana-
lytic philosophers think its entirely beside the point, philosophically.
MD: Yes. But look, at the very beginning of the century, say at
the time Husserl published the Logical Investigations, there wasnt yet
phenomenology as a school. There wasnt yet analytic philosophy as
a school. There were lots of currents there and you would have put
Frege and Husserl quite close together, and yet their progeny
diverged so widely. Its a very interesting question from which it
seems to me that much understanding must come. Why did they
diverge so widely? Another way I could put it is this. In the analytic
tradtion itself, there are now a number of people - Gareth Evans
was one of the earliest - who reject what I once called the funda-
13. The original text of the series of lectures p e n at the University of Bologna in
1987 appeared in Lingua e Stile, Anno XXIII, 1988, pp. 3-49, 171-210. A revised
version was then published as Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Duckworth, London,
1993. I refer to this edition hereafter.
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Fabrice Pataut 15
mental theorem of analytic philosophy, the priority of language over
thought.
FP: The priority thesis.
M D Yes, the priority thesis. Nevertheless, they are very clearly in
the analytic tradition. I dont suppose Evans ever read a word of
Husserl in his entire life. In his book, Russell, Frege and Moore
were the pillars.I4 There are other people now. Christopher
Peacocke is another. That prompts a question: What is essential to
analytic philosophy? Earlier, you might have said that it was the pri-
ority thesis. They all accepted that. But thats no longer true. Are
these people analytic philosophers? Its pretty plain that they are
because the kmd of analysis that they go in for is very simdar to, or
at least is developed fi-om, a Fregean theory of meaning, a Fregean
semantics, or something like that. So the question of determining
what is essential to analytic philosophy is indeed a very interesting
question. But how can you understand that unless you go back to its
origins? What distinguishes this kind of philosophy from others?
Where exactly does the divergence come in? So I think theres an
enormous amount of work to be done.
Another thing I ldnt lscuss at all in my first book, but that I
think you can get a lot of illumination from, is the fact that we dont
understand at all the interaction between Wittgenstein and the
Vienna Circle. Because of the Tractatus. Thats the book. Wittgenstein
revered Frege. But its school-of-Russell much more than school-
of-Frege. It was written in the Cambridge atmosphere, right? The
problems that he had been thinking about were problems that
Russell, Ramsey and so on, had been thinking about. And then, it
made this great impact on these completely different people, in a
completely dlfferent atmosphere, in Vienna. What exactly hap-
pened? What was the relation between Wittgenstein and these
people? I dont really understand it at all, and it seems to me that
when we do, we should learn a lot, not just historical, but philo-
sophical.
Fl? You also say at the very beginning of the book that youre
not interested in the causal relations between authors and theories,
but in the posterity of ideas that were in lair du temps at the turn of
the century, ideas that one also finds in authors not belonging to the
14. 7he Varieties .f Reference, edited by J. McDowell, Clarendon Press, Oxford,

1982. Also by Gareth Evans: Collected Papers, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985.
8 Blackwell PubLhers Ltd. 1996
analytic tradtion, like Brentano and Hus~er1.I~ At some point, you

say more precisely that what interests you is the legitimate posterity
of these ideas. Are there any intruders, people who illegitimately
claim they belong to the analytic tradltion but really dont?
MD. Thats a very good question. The only people who occur to
me at this moment as being intruders are people of various kinds
who think that philosophy is finished in some way or another.
Among them, there are several so-called followers of Wittgenstein.
Of course, there are Baker and Hacker, who think that there really
are no further philosophical problems to be solved. Once youve
attained nirvana as they have, then you see that any phlosophical
discussion is bound to be nonsense. All you can do is spit out the
history of it and point out what nonsense of different kinds these
people were talhng. Its just the history of pseudo-problems and of
the nonsensical series of solutions proposed to solve them. Thats all
there is to it. Rorty, in the United States, from a slightly different
perspective, essentially preaches the same doctrine.
Fl? Its been preached on the Continent for a long time.
M D Is that true? Who does?
Fl? Derrida, for instance. But also, and more generally, it has
been preached by people who are convinced that there is a funda-
mental discontinuity between philosophical problems as they appear
at different stages of history, or rather, between the successive con-
stnrafs of these problems. In this case, the doctrine appears to be a
dlrect consequence of an historicist conception of philosophy rather
than a philosophical credo people would just blindly believe in. In
some cases, it has led people to judge that solutions to traditional
problems are a priori bound to fail.
MD. But Derrida doesnt pretend to be in the analytic tradition.
Fl? But the continental influence is very great on Rorty. And,
through people like Rorty, on Putnam, curiously enough.
15. Origins ofAnalytical Philosophy, pp. 2-3.

16. Op.cit., p. 3: I shall talk about the directions in which various philosophical
ideas led and what were the legitimate developments from them, without much
troubling myself about who read whose work or whether X derived a certain idea
from Y or arrived at it independently.
17. G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, vol. 1
of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
1980; vol. 2: Witgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
1985.
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Fabrice Pataut 17
MD. Putnam rejects a lot of what Rorty says, but he is a bit
influenced by h m . Alright, lets class them all as intruders.
FZ? So how should we identify analytic philosophy? It appears to
be quite a dfficult task. We cant do it by saying that there is a clus-
ter of positions that all analytic philosophers should hold just because
theyre analytic philosophers. (This is, by the way, how some people
conceive things on the Continent: analytic philosophers are all
empiricists or positivists of some sort or another.) We cant, as it
were, do it by content, but we cant do it by method either. There
is no such thing as one single method that all analytic philosophers
share when they look at a particular problem. So how should we do
it? In Ortgins of Analytical Philosophy you adopt a very strong and
restricted point of view on this matter when you claim that only a
philosophical analysis of language may lead us to a philosophical
analysis of thought. It seems to me that if we take that view, the
work of Gareth Evans isnt really part of that tradtion anymore.
Perhaps it still would be, but only marginally.
MD: But, historically, its very clear that it does, right?
F P Historically it does and thats precisely the point I wanted to
make. We could also look at this problem from a different angle.
Think, for instance, of Nelson Goodmans way of explaining what
(his own particular brand 09 nominalism amounts to. He is not so
much engaged in saying what individuals are. (I agree that he even-
tually does that.) He is primarily engaged in explaining what it is to
describe the world as composed of individ~als.~ One could say:
Well, thats a typically analytic way to proceed. The metaphysical
question per se is postponed until the linguistic question is properly
understood or solved, or maybe even until we have found a satisfac-
tory formulation of the linguistic question. We could find many
other instances.
But let me return to Evans and to the analysis of singular thoughts
that he proposes in his Understanding Demonstratives, which, in
many ways, is founded on an implicit rejection of the thesis that you
take to be the fundamental thesis of analytic philosophy. Evans sup-
poses that to ascribe a Fregean sense to a singular term is to say that
18. Op. cit., p. 4: What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifesta-
tions, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought
can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a
comprehensive account can only [emphasis mine] be so attained.
19. See, e.g., Nelson Goodman, A World of In&viduals, reprinted in Problems and
Projects, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis and New York, p. 159.
0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996
there is a particular way in which its referent must be thought of (as
the referent) if the term is to be understood.20 If we follow Evans
suggestion, our explanation will go from the thought to the sen-
tence and the term. We will start by explaining what it is to have or
to entertain a thought about a particular object and afterwards we
will characterise the meaning of the sentence containing an occur-
rence of the singular term having the object as its referent in terms
of an expression of that particular thought about the object. Our
epistemic attitudes - to use Evans phrase - towards the thoughts
we entertain, do play a role in the determination of sense. So what
role, if any, should we attribute to this priority thesis in the
identification of analpc philosophy?
MD: You certainly cant do it by doctrine, as youve said. You
could take this attitude that, once the priority thesis is rejected,
youre into post-analytic philosophy or something like that. You
could make that a defining characteristic. But I think that would be
wrong, or unhelphl anyway. I think the big dfference between
analytic philosophers and others is probably that all analytic philoso-
phers assume something resembling the kind of semantics that
underlies mathematical logic, i.e. Fregean semantics. Not necessarily
in all the detds, but they nevertheless assume some such structure,
where the components of sentences or the components of thoughts
- one projects and models the structure of thoughts on the structure
of sentences - contribute to the semantic value of complete sen-
tences or complete thoughts. That contribution is something that
goes towards furing their truth or assertibhty.
Fl? So compositionality is the defining characteristic?
MD: Not just compositionality as a general principle, but compo-
sitionality along with some idea of a syntax roughly like that of
standard predcate logic. Thats very vague and it might be chfficult
to apply it to some of the ordmary language philosophers. But I
think that it is nevertheless their background and that it does distin-
guish analytical philosophers from others. Many pay very little
attention to mathematical logic. Nevertheless, its been part of the
formation of all of them. It just enters into the perspective they have
on meaning and content.
20. Gareth Evans, Collected Papers, pp. 291-321. The quote is from p. 301. See also,
at the end of sec. IV, pp. 308-11, the remarks about epistemic states, keeping
track of an object, and having hold of an object.
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Fabrice Pataut 19
FP: Is it a matter of style, then? A lot of people in analytic philos-

ophy today arent interested, either directly or indirectly, in
mathematical logic.
MD: Mathematical logic is a vast structure that goes far beyond
the elementary part which may be all that theyve learned. But ele-
mentary logic is nevertheless in the background of their conception
of language and thought, whereas it may not be for those who lack
that elementary knowledge. I actually dont know how it is. If you
study philosophy in a French university, are you taught elementary
mathematical logic?
FP: You are indeed, although most people think its entirely irrel-
evant to deep philosophical issues. They see it as a purely technical
subject matter.
5. Anti-Realism, Verificationism and the Philosophy of Mind
FP: I have a series of questions to ask you regarding the relation

between the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind and
anti-realism. Let me begin with the kind of anti-realism which you
advocate, or rather, with the sort of challenge you think the realist
must meet. A lot of people have the feeling that the kmd of seman-
tics you endorse must amount to some form or other of
verificationism. There is, for instance, Michael Devitts criticism,21
which certainly rests on an interpretation of t h s kmd, and also
Stephen Schiffers, who, in Remnants of Meaning, is quite close to
accusing you of both verificationism and behaviourism.22Of course,
these are philosophical positions that I guess nobody would dare to
endorse today. Stdl, it is tempting to think that an anti-realist theory
of meaning is close to, if not identical with, a verificationist theory
of meaning. What is the main difference between anti-realism as
you conceive it and this somewhat outdated position? How would
you draw the distinction between the two?
MD: You said that no one would be a verificationist. I have actu-
ally in the past used the term verification, but I dont think it is an
entirely happy term to use. Justification is better and the idea I
21. Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984,
ch. 12.
22. Stephen Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,
1987, sec. 8.4.
D Blackwell PubLshen Ltd. 1996
defend is that the meaning of a statement is given by the kind of
justification that could be gwen for it.
There is a big contrast between the verificationism of the Vienna
Circle and the sort of theory of meaning that I advocate, which lies
in its rejection - by me that is - of the kind of atomism that was
implicit in the positivists idea. The positivists spoke as though each
sentence could be considered as having a sense or meaning indepen-
dently of its belonging to a language; that is, independently of there
being any other sentences related to it. Verification would ultimately
consist in some sequence of sense experiences. Now, thats obvious
nonsense. You cant have a theory of meaning which ignores the
fact that our sentences are part of a language and bear relations to
other sentences. In general, the justification of any assertion, of any
statement, will be something that involves not only an experience
but also inference. This is exactly the contrast which is made in
Quines famous article Two Dogmas of Empiri~isrn.~~ He ends up
with this image of language as an articulated structure with some
thngs . . .
Fl? . . . at the periphery . . .
MD: . . . and some things further in, and so on. Think of the
conception of meaning that he employs - and Im not saying that I
am entirely happy with this as it stands. The fact is that he doesnt
attack positivism for being verificationist as such. On the contrary,
the image he ends up with has to do entirely with the conformity of
the structure of sentences, and of the truth-values assigned to those
Sentences, with experience. Experience has an impact on the struc-
ture as a whole. So its still understood in terms of verification (or
falsification if you like) and in terms of the adjustments that have to
be made to the structure under the impact of experience. What he
attacks is the conception accordmg to which each sentence, as it
were, stands by itself and waits to see if anything has an impact on it.
FP Isolated, as it were, from the rest of language.
MD: Exactly. It is clear that the impact may be transmitted from
the periphery towards the centre and that the transmission is made
by inferential connections, although he doesnt spell out exactly
how. But the point is this: you shouldnt think ofjustification along
t h s empiricist model of just some sequence of sense experiences. It
may take any form you like. That was why the positivists had to
23. The article is reprinted in Quine, From a Logical Point of View - Nine Logico-
Philosophical Essays, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, pp. 20-46.
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Fabrice Pataut 21
make this dichotomy between empirical sentences and mathematical

ones.
Fl? O r formal sentences in general . . .
M D . . . that have a completely &fferent kmd of meaning. But
on the conception I am advocating, there is a range. There are
purely observational sentences - if you can say there are any -
which are just to be verified by observation dlrectly, without any
mediation of inference. At the other end, there are things which are
established purely by reasoning, like mathematical theorems, and
most things occupy some intermehate position. So thats the con-
trast between verificationism and anti-realism.
In a way, the difference depends on what you mean by
verification. If verification just means that its done in terms of
how we establish a statement as true or false, then my theory of
meaning is verificationist. Except that I dont want to insist that for
every statement, there is a way of establishing it conclusively. Im per-
fectly prepared to admit that there are some statements for which
there is no conclusive establishment. There are always cases where
statements can be overthrown later, where theyre capable of revision.
It is a characteristic of the meaning of certain sentences that they can
be confirmed but not conclusively established. You could call it
verificationist in that general sense if you like, but not in the atomistic
sense, and not prejudging what form a justification might take.
I think justification is just probably a better term. I originally
used verificationist because I wanted slightly to shock people.
Everyone was saying: Positivism has now been refuted. They never
had any good account of why it had been refuted. In my opinion,
Quine was the person who refuted it. Most people just knew we
&dnt believe that any longer but didnt have any argument. So they
got shocked. I wanted to stay that its not the verificationist compo-
nent, its the atomistic component that was wrong with it.
FP: Do you stdl want to hold on to the analytic/synthetic distinc-
tion?
MD. Yes I do. I think its wrong to throw that overboard.
FP: So, in a nutshell, you think that the meaning of a statement is
determined or fvred by, lets say, its justification con&tions, but that
these conditions cannot be construed in an atomistic way.
MD: Thats exactly right. Above all that, I think that these con&-
tions will usually include a component of inference. So language is
dependent on language, as it were.
8 Blackwell PubliBen Ltd 1996
FP But ifjustification conditions may not be construed atomisti-
cally, shouldnt they, then, be construed holistically? The
understanding of a sentence will always depend on the understand-
ing of sentences lying somewhere on one of the paths from it
towards the periphery or from the periphery towards it. Isnt that
going in the direction of holism?
MD: I dont think so. You get holism if you abolish the distinc-
tion between the periphery and the interior, right?
FP: So, do you want to separate the periphery/interior dlstinction
from the analytic/synthetic distinction?
MD: I want to have a direction. Obviously, inference works in
both directions. I #ant to have a relation of dependence of meaning
that goes, roughly speakmg, only in one direction because I think
that we couldnt master language if holism were correct. I certainly
think we couldnt give a systematic description of how it finctions
if it were correct.
Could I add something? A lot of the attack on the analytidsyn-
thetic distinction has to do with an observed feature of natural
languages, namely, that there is a very great deal of play. That is cer-
tainly justified. If you wanted to give a systematic theory of
meaning, you would have to parcel out sense, as it were, between the
dlfferent words and constructions of a language, and there probably
isnt any unique way of doing that. If we were asked to explain
meaning, or to explain what someone must know in order to know
the meaning of an expression, we would probably assign the same
meaning to dlfferent expressions. That makes a kind of holism in
our understanding of a language. We dont have a sharp way of say-
ing: Well, if we dont understand that, then thats the word whose
meaning we dont know. O n the other hand, contrast this with the
sort of rigid Fregean scheme where each expression has its perfectly
determined sense. I think that it is an ideal towards which we con-
sciously strive when we need to, and we need to when there are
disputes or uncertainties about what our justifications are. We build
theories, and when we do that, we have to come to some agree-
ment as to what will be counted as the sense or the definition of this
or that term, so we tidy things up and make them approximate to
the Fregean scheme.
So I dont want to say that the analytic/synthetic dlstinction is
one that has an absolutely determinate application to our language as
it is. But I dont think it is something to be thrown away. O n the
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Fabrice Pataut 23
contrary, it is something that we need to use when were trying to

resolve disagreements or understand justifications of what we only
vaguely believe .
FP I would like to go back to the opposition between the phi-
losophy of language and the philosophy of thought. We talked
about it in relation to the priority thesis and its role in the
identlfication of analytic philosophy. But I would like us to talk
about the possibihty of an anti-realist philosophy of mind in con-
nection with the priority thesis.
You have said that the roots of the notion of the truth (or falsity)
of a linguistic item (a sentence, a statement) lie in the mstinction
between a speakers being objectively right or objectively wrong in
what he says when he makes an assertion.24 If that is the case, then
the notion of assertion, in some way or other, is more fundamental
than the notion of truth. N o w its hard to see how we could gwe a
satisfactory analysis of the notion of assertion without taking psycho-
logical notions into account: notions such as belief, desire, intention,
and the like.25 So if the notion of assertion is more hndamental
than that of truth, and if we need the notion of assertion to give a
philosophical account of the notion of truth, it looks like we have
to appeal to psychological notions to explain the notion of truth.
Should we?
M D I understand the question. Id like to say something first,
which isnt a direct answer to the question, just to clarify the posi-
tion I wish to defend. I think that the notion of correct and
incorrect assertion is much more primitive than the notion of truth.
There are lots of examples in philosophy, of people saying: Such-
and-such forms of utterances arent statements with definite
truth-conditions. People say this about conditionals, for example.
Hilbert said it about arithmetical statements with unbounded
quantifiers. Now, what theyre saying is that youve got to interpret
those utterances as making a claim. Its very clear in the simplest
instances, for example in Hilberts interpretation of existentially
quantified statements as incomplete communications. The idea is
that we are justified in saying them if we can produce an instance.
In this perspective, the crucial distinction isnt between objective
truth and objective falsity. The crucial hstinction is stated in terms
24. Truth and Other Enigmas,p . xvii.

25. See, e.g., once again, Truth and Other Etzpnas, p. xvii.
8 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1996
of what we can do, in terms of whether or not we can just;@ our
claim. And that fits perfectly well with the idea of a correct us. an
incorrect assertion.
The difference between t h s perspective and taking an assertion as
having an objective truth-value is that the truth-conditions have to
be independent of my epistemological conltion, of anything I can
do, unless, of course, the statement is about me. The idea is then
that the assertion is determinately true or false independently of
whether I can justify it or not. Whereas in the other perspective, we
just think of it in terms of whether I can justitjr the claim I make.
Thats what I mean when I say that the notion of assertion maps out
a route, as it were, leading to the notion of truth. But youve got to
go much further to get to the notion of truth properly so called. Its
just the beginning, as it were, in this direction. To get to the notion
of truth, you have to ask: Why, if at all, can I not just take this as
malung a claim? Why did I have to give it some objective assess-
ment, independent of me?
I thnk the step in your argument that I should reject is the claim
that assertion has to be explained psychologlcally. I know that there
was a phase when Russell and Wittgenstein would both have said
that, but I dont believe it. I think it is a complicated matter. We
have assertion as an outward act. You come up with a sentence that
you have to understand as said assertorically, and there is also the
inner act of judgement, when you judge something to be true. I
think that its better to regard the judgement as an internalization of
the external act of assertion than the other way around, i.e. than to
regard the assertion as an expression of an internal state or internal
act.
Theres a question that occurs somewhere in Philosophical
Investigations: What is the language game of assertion? Actually,
Wittgenstein thinks that there isnt one such thing as assertion. There
are these various and different cases. But I think that it is neverthe-
less a perfectly correct question to ask.
We have very little temptation to explain what giving a command
is in psychological terms. Normally speakmg, if one person is in a
position of authority with respect to another one when issuing a
command, you normally assume that he wants the other person to
do what he commands her to do. But you dont have to assume that
he might have some other motives for giving her the command. The
fact is that if he really is in a position of authority, hes just giving the
8 Blackwell Publishen Ltd. 1996
Fabrice Pataut 25
command and that has certain effects, for whatever reason he gave
that command. What we have to do is to describe the language
game of command and I think the same is true of assertion. Its not
nearly so obvious there because the consequences are not sharp in
the way that the consequences of gwing a command are. That
makes it much more complicated to describe, but I think that this is
what has to be described to be the language game of communica-
tion, which involves telling people things, rather than anything
about internal states. So I dont believe that you have to bring in
intention or belief; or if you have to bring in intention, it is only at
quite a late stage, as it were.
FP So what you need is merely a description of the linguistic act
of assertion? And you can g v e that without talung intentions,
beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes into account?
MD: Thats what I hope. I mean, if you say: fight. Go ahead
and do it! - I cant. Because it rests on the entire theory of meaning
and I dont exactly know how to do that.
FP I wont ask you then. Ill ask you something else instead. My
second question about the philosophy of language us. the philoso-
phy of mind concerns directly the content of the realism 11s.
anti-realism debate. This debate, as you conceive it, cannot be
merely about linguistic items (statements, sentences) for at least, it
s e e m to me, three reasons. To begin with, it should also be about
beliefs and belief states because we also evaluate beliefs and belief
states in terms of truth and falsity. Secondly, meaning is a cognitive
notion. It is whatever competent speakers and agents understand or
know when they understand the meaning of sentences or know
what that meaning is, and the question of knowing how meaning is
mentally represented matters greatly to the debate. Finally, the ques-
tion of deciding whether or not the notion of truth must be
epistemologically constrained dmctly concerns the nature of the
concept of truth which we may o r may not legitimately form.
Given that the debate cannot be merely about linguistic under-
standing, and must also be about concept formation, wouldnt it be
possible, not to say mandatory, to construe it as a debate in the phi-
losophy of mind in its own right, not only about the meaning of
sentences but also about mental content?
A4D We& I may agree with you. I certainly wouldnt think that
it was a topic that had a great bearing on these metaphysical disputes
about realism - as I do - if I thought it was just a question of
8 Blackwell Publishen Lrd. 1996
language, just a bit of semantics. We were talking earlier about the
priority thesis. Now, if one is a follower of Evans or Peacocke and
thinks that you have to describe the structure of our thoughts inde-
pendently of their linguistic expression, the same dichotomy
nevertheless arises between an account in terms of truth-conditions
- what has to be the case for the thought to be true - and an
account in terms of, lets say, justification, on the basis of whether
you can recognise it as true. So the same question arises there, as it
overtly does in Evans and Peacocke.
F P Should we conclude that theres no advantage to seeing it as a
debate in the phlosophy of mind?
M D I dont think there would be any advantage. As you know, I
believe in the priority thesis. The difference between these two
approaches is that the philosophy of mind approach or the philoso-
phy of thought approach tend to be solipsistic. The talk is about
individual subjects, about what content an individual subject can give
to the thought, how he recognises the thought to be true, and so on.
And it doesnt have much to do - at least normally - with commu-
nication, whereas I thnk that you probably wont get a good answer
if you dont discuss it in terms of communication. But thats a large
issue.
FP There are two distinct issues with respect to the priority the-
sis. There is a methodological issue, and an issue about the content of
the reahsm us. anti-realism debate. One problem is to decide
whether or not the philosophy of thought can be approached only
through the philosophy of language, or whether or not language is
prior to thought in the order of explanation. Thats a methodologi-
cal issue and its one thing. Another question is to decide whether
or not the debate is also about mental content. It clearly is in the
sense that if what is being debated is whether the meaning of a sen-
tence is determined by its truth-conditions, then the problem of
knowing whether or not the content of the thought expressed by
the sentence is determined by its truth-conditions is also part of the
debate.
So there are indeed two dstinct issues: the methodology issue and
the content issue. It seems to me that the strong methodological
stand that you choose to take on the first one doesnt have any bear-
ing on the second. Theyre logcally distinct. So the overturning of
the fundamental axiom of analytic philosophy doesnt make a differ-
ence and it is perfectly legitimate to start with the issue of the
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Fabrice Pataut 27
content of our thoughts. O n the other hand, we end up with the
same problems.
MD: I think thats perfectly true. I think it is a question of
methodology. You do have the same problems. And thats why to a
large extent, as you say, the overturning doesnt actually impede the
communication between people who are on one side or the other
very much. But there is a point at which they diverge and which
has to do with methodology. That is: the philosopher of thought is
not going to take much notice of anything that has to do with ver-
bal exchange, whereas, obviously, language is prior in the order of
explanation. Language is a communal thing. Its in the first place a
means of communication.
FP: Is it precisely because it is a communal thing that you want to
hold the priority thesis?
M D Yes.
FZ? But now, Fregean thoughts are also a communal thing.
Someone may very well argue in favour of the priority thesis on the
basis that it has the advantage of avoiding psychologism. But what is
the pitfall of psychologism if not believing that thoughts are part of
the stream of consciousness? It seems to me that a crucial question,
then, is to decide whether or not the confusion between Gedanke
and Vorstellung necessarily follows horn the rejection of the priority
thesis. Suppose we follow the suggestion of Evans which we CGs-
cussed earlier. Are we thereby doing psychology in the sense
criticised by Frege and Husserl? Do we have to argue that the way
in which the referent is thought of, its mode of presentation at the
level of thought, is part of the stream of consciousness? If only for
Fregean reasons, one could say: Yes, there is a point in h o l l n g the
priority thesis. It offers a good protection against the pitfalls of psy-
chologism. But now, is that confusion between Gedanke and
Vorstellung really unavoidable? Arent there ways of avoiding the
confusion while rejecting the priority thesis?
MD: Of course, its far too swift just to say: The minute you do
this, youll fill into psychologism. Im not saying that. But I think that
its necessary for the philosopher of thought, as much as it is for the
philosopher of language, to respect the context principle. If we con-
sider what Evans says about particular ways of thinhng about a
referent and what he says about singular referents, singular thoughts,
and so on, we have to recognise that the way we think about a partic-
ular object is something which is part of a complete thought. The way
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of thinlung of an object is something that is an ingredient of a whole
thought. It makes no sense to talk about it independently o f . . .
FP: . . . the context in which it is embedded.
MD: Thats right: independently of the context of thnlung some-
thing to be the case with the object in question. You have to ask the
question: What is it to have a whole thought? Unless youre to fall
into psychologistic explanations of that, you have to treat it, as Frege
himself did, as the object of a propositional attitude. It is to believe
something or to believe that something is the case. Its got to be the
content of a propositional attitude. Thats exactly what Peacocke
does. He builds the whole thing on first being able to characterise
the attitudes that a being who perhaps hasnt got a language may
nevertheless manifest.26
FP: And he takes thoughts to be Fregean thoughts, Gedarzken.
M D Theyre exactly like that, and they are the objects of beliefs
or desires, or one of these things. I still dont believe that such a
programme will work, but I certainly dont think one can straight
off accuse it of psychologsm. If one could give a characterisation of
these propositional attitudes without reference to their expression,
the thng would work. I dont think that Peacocke or anyone else
has actually shown that.
Fl? Youre very pessimistic about the prospects of the philosophy
of mind. What about cognitive science?
MD: I am pessimistic about cognitive science. Im not pessimistic
about these people -John Campbell is another one - who go to the
philosophy of thought. To start with, Im certain that they will dis-
cover a lot in their inquiries even if their whole basic premise is
wrong, even if theyre wrong to overturn the priority thesis. What
they will discover will remain and well be able to transpose it from
thought to language in case they revert back to the priority thesis.
Secondly, I just think it is very interesting to see how far that can be
pushed. One reason why its interesting is that if the whole thing is
completely successful, then the priority thesis would be entirely
wrong and would have no interest. But even if it isnt wrong, it will
be very interesting to see where, specifically, a programme built on
the rejection of the thesis can go.
FP: And how far it can go.
26. See, e.g., Christopher Peacocke, Thoughts: An Essay on Conterit, Basil Blackwell,
Oxford, 1986.
R, Blackwell Publishers Ld,1996
Fabrice Pataut 29
MD. How far it can go exactly. Thats quite an obscure question.
Even Frege thought that the priority thesis was only relative to us.
He thought that beings without language could grasp the same
thoughts as we do, only not clothed in linguistic expression. But he
gave no explanation of what that would be like. All he said about
this was that its not contradictory. What does it mean? If people
going for the philosophy of mind are right, they will be giving an
explanation of that. Its just a matter of contingent fact - if its a fact
at all - that we can grasp thoughts through the medium of language.
What is it about us that makes that? All these questions are genuine
and very interesting. I do hope they will uncover something.
Fl? There is a very strong tendency in analytic philosophy to
switch to the philosophy of mind to the disadvantage, as it were, of
the philosophy of language. Its pretty clear that people in the
United States are moving in this direction. There is more and more
philosophy of mind.
MD: A lot of it is of poor quality in my opinion.
Fl? The gap between English and American philosophy seems to
be getting wider and wider on this point. It is due, in great part, to
the immense impact of cognitive science in the United States.
MD: I think thats true. And that doesnt worry me at all, because
I really think that American philosophy is for the most part on a
very bad track.
Fl? You mean the philosophy of mind specifically?
M D Of course its hardly true of JSripke o r Putnam, and its
hardly true of Davidson. But the general tendency is in this sort of
scientistic direction, which seems to me to be sterile.
Fl? You mean materialism, physicalism, and so on?
MD: All that stuff. Its not going to lead anywhere.
Fl? It led at least to one thing. The position were in now is
exactly the opposite of the position that Brentano and Husserl were
in. They took intentionality to be the irreducible mark of the mental,
whereas we take ourselves to be just flesh and blood, physical
beings, and we wonder: How can that have intentionality? How
could machines, or whatever could be described in purely physical
terms, have intentions and thoughts? And we try to account for
intentionality in naturalistic terms.
MD. Alright, thats a philosophical question to ask. But I really
hope that English philosophy will look much more towards what is
happening in other European countries and much less to whats
0 Blackwell Pubbrherr Ltd 1996
happening in America. Its the language that causes many people to
do that. Its much easier to read articles in American journals. Its
amazing. There are all these people like Jonathan Barnes, Kevin
Mulligan, Peter Simmons, and so on, who manage to adapt them-
selves to teaching abroad. Very few graduates do that. Mostly, I think,
because of the language. That comes back to language teaching in
schools. We ought perhaps to have language courses for graduate stu-
dents; require them to master at least one European language.
Fl? To go back to the situation with respect to the US. Its very
strilung that your work, for instance, doesnt have much echo there.
Very few people actually care to read it. Putnam is one. Brian Loar
and Paul Honvich, who teaches in America, also do read it care-
fully. There was the same situation with Gareth Evans. Few
American phdosophers have bothered to read him.
MD: Thats true, and that was a very great pity I think, Putnam
was partly responsible for that. He wrote a terrible review of The
Vurieties of Reference and dismissed it entirely. I dont know why he
did that. Its a very severe misjudgement. It may not have had much
influence. It may just have been a symptom rather than a cause. I
dont know. But its certainly true that they ought to read Evans and
its a very serious mistake. There are many riches in that book.
6. Anti-Realism and Ethics
Fl? I have one last question. It is about ethics. Maybe there is no

such thing as a consistent philosophical doctrine, overview, or
Weltanschauung one would call global anti-realism, and which would
consist in anti-reahm about mathematics and the natural world and
the mental life of others and moral agents, etc.
MD: There may be.
Fl? But the fact is that youve never argued for that sort of posi-
tion. There is, however, a range of philosophical disputes sharing
the common form, as you say, of a conflict between a realist and an
anti-realist view or interpretation of statements of a given class, i.e.
mathematical statements, statements about the natural world, the
mental life of others, ethical commands, and so on. The debate as
you conceive it, and as some other people like Crispin Wright have
conceived it after you, certainly applies to ethics as well. There is,
let us say, the issue of realism about moral bcts or moral values. My
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Fabrice Pataut 31
question is: What should the anti-realist challenge to realism in
ethlcs amount to?
Let me make this more precise. There are at least two ways of
expressing moral reahsm: in terms of facts and in terms of values. In
terms of facts, it would amount to the following: There are objec-
tive moral facts which are part of the fabric of the world and it is the
aim of moral deliberation to discover them. There is, let us say, the
objective fact that slavery is unjust. Now, we could also express
moral realism in terms of values. Moral reahsm would then amount
to the following: Some actions, practices, and institutions must be
adopted or, on the contrary, criticised and abandoned accorIng to
whether they foster or promote values which we are objectively
justified in accepting or, on the contrary, in rejecting. The purpose
of moral deliberation is to dscover which values we must adopt and
which ones we must reject, and when we discover that, we discover
something objective. To go back to the example of slavery, a reahst
could express his position by arguing that the values associated with
the institution and practice of slavery have to be abolished and that
the reasons we have to do so are objective reasons. The purpose of
moral deliberation is to be able to make decisions in all the cases
which may be less clear-cut than slavery, say, for example, euthana-
sia or abortion.
It seems to me that the anti-realist argument against moral realism
construed in terms offacts should be an argument supporting some
form or other of non-cognitivism. If I am right, an anti-realist
should argue that moral claims are cognitively empty in the sense
that we cannot report moral facts. There simply arent any to I s -
cover. The question I want to ask you is the following: What should
an anti-realist argument against moral realism construed in terms of val-
ues amount to? Must an anti-realist support some form or other of
relativism and argue that our actions, practices, institutions, and so
on, are either just or unjust only relatively to a set of culturally based
beliefs which form, as it were, the background conditions of our
justifications, so that all of our ethical justificationscannot fail to be
prejuIced in some very strong and ineliminable sense?
Do you want to argue in favour of some form or other of anti-
reahsm for ethics? If you do, what is this position and how do you
intend to argue for it?
MD: Ill do my best to give you an answer. I could only give you a
very programmatic answer because, to my shame, Ive never spent
0 Blackwell Pubhshers Ltd. 1996
any time thinking about this. Not that Ive been thinking that we can
very well do without it. I just havent thought about it very much.
It does seem to me, at least, that the application of these anti-
realist ideas to ethics ought to change the terms of the debate, for
the following reason. The kind of anti-reahsm that I envisage is not
subjectivism of any lund. Its completely objective, or it assumes
objectivity, in the sense that whether or not a statement is justified is
an objective matter. Just think of the case of mathematics. Whether
or not you have a proof of a statement is an objective matter. Were
not tallung in terms of whether the statement is true of some inde-
pendent moral reality. We are talking about the making of a claim
whose justification is objectively sound or objectively unsound. If
one adopted anything like an anti-reahst position in this sense
towards ethics, there would be no question of it being a subjectivist
position. I think that to qualify it as non-cognitivist would also be
quite wrong. Justification is a matter of cognitive justification. O n the
other hand, one shouldnt think that the only alternative to a subjec-
tivist account of ethics is a lund of realist picture of ethical
statements as describing a reality existing independently of us, or of
making statements that are objectively true or false. The explanation
of such statements must account for the fact that the person who
makes them is in principle capable of justifying them. One would
have to investigate t h s and I cant say anything much about what
lund, exactly, of justification we would need to have, what kind
would be constitutive of a justification of an ethical statement.
Fl? Of a normative statement in particular.
MD: Right. I wont try now. But that would be the line you
would have to take if you wanted to see what ethical anti-realism
would look like. I mean, it probably would be a middle position.
Fl? Maybe something akin to Wiggins position. Wiggins wants
to defend cognitivism coupled to an under-determination with
respect to moral claims. O n the face of it, cognitivism is a natural
ally of realism. But if Wiggins is right, this just amounts to a
superficial intuition. We also tend to think that theism is a natural
ally of reahsm. You talk about theism at the very end of The Logical
Basis of Metaphysics.
27. See Needs, Values, T&h, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, especially pp. 124-32.
28. The revised text of the 1976 Harvard William James Lectures is now published
as The Logical Basis ofMetaphysics, Duckworth, London, 1991. The remarks about
theism are to be found in chapter 15, pp. 348-51.
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Fabrice Pataut 33
MD: Not very much.
Fl? Maybe, but you suggest, dont you, that theism isnt a neces-
sary ally of reahsm.
MD: Thats what I would want to argue. This may be an illegiti-
mate transition, but let me go back to Plato and to the old dilemma
Is something good because God wills it, or does God d it because
its good? A.J. Ayer was very keen on arguing that the second part
of the question amounts to an invalid suggestion and that, therefore,
God is irrelevant to ethical judgement. Wittgenstein, on the con-
trary, comes down very heavily in favour of the first and takes the
second to be completely superficial. Now it seems to me that, of
course, if someone believes that he has reasons to think that God
wds or commands or wishes us to act in a certain way, then that, by
itself, must be enough reason to act in that way. But then you have
to have recourse to some particular means of knowing what is Gods
will. Whereas the traditional view has been that we can perceive
what is right and what 1s wrong and deduce from that what God
wills us to do. Let me just say that I think the direction of our argu-
ment must certainly be along the second line.
Fl? I guess that weve talked for quite a long time. We could stop
here. Thank you very much.
MD: Thank you. I enjoyed our discussion very much.
Institut dHistoire et de Philosophie

des Sciences et des Techniques
Universiti de Paris 1
France
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Philosophical Znuestigafions 19:1 January 1996

An Anti-Realist Perspective on Language,

Fabrice Pataut, bistitut dHistoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et

1. Frege and Wittgenstein

Fabrice Pataut: You are one of the most prominent philosophers in

1. The interview took place in Oxford on 10 September 1992. While working

2. Inconsistency, Holism, Harmony and Intuitionism

FP: Let me go back to Wittgenstein. My next question concerns

that can be communicated from one mathematician to another.

3. Austin, Ryle and Carnap

Fl? May I go back to Wittgenstein? You said in the Preface to Truth

4.Analytic Phlosophy, its History and the Priority Thesis

University of California Press, Berkeley, 1967. Nelson Goodman, The Structure of

14. 7he Varieties .f Reference, edited by J. McDowell, Clarendon Press, Oxford,

analytic tradtion, like Brentano and Hus~er1.I~ At some point, you

15. Origins ofAnalytical Philosophy, pp. 2-3.

FP: Is it a matter of style, then? A lot of people in analytic philos-

5. Anti-Realism, Verificationism and the Philosophy of Mind

FP: I have a series of questions to ask you regarding the relation

make this dichotomy between empirical sentences and mathematical

contrary, it is something that we need to use when were trying to

24. Truth and Other Enigmas,p . xvii.

6. Anti-Realism and Ethics

Fl? I have one last question. It is about ethics. Maybe there is no

Institut dHistoire et de Philosophie

0 Blackwell Publisherr Ltd 1996

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