Cambridge Analysis
1900 – 1939
Break the problem into its parts, say exactly what each word is doing, and find that several great questions were badly phrased.
- Active
- 1900 – 1939
- Where
- Cambridge
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Anglo American
The claim
Analysis: a complex proposition is clarified by exhibiting its logical form, which is often different from its grammatical form, and confusion between the two produces most philosophical problems.
What it held
Russell's theory of descriptions is the movement's exhibit. The present King of France is bald looks like a subject-predicate sentence about a person who does not exist. Russell shows it is really three claims — that there is a King of France, that there is only one, and that he is bald — and that the sentence is therefore simply false rather than about a non-existent object. Ramsey called it a paradigm of philosophy, and it established the method: rewrite until the logical form is visible, and the problem may dissolve.
Moore's contribution is different in temper. He rejected idealism partly on the grounds that its conclusions were less certain than the ordinary beliefs it denied, and his proof of an external world consists of holding up his hands. It looks like a joke and is a serious argument about where the burden lies.
In ethics Moore's naturalistic fallacy claimed that good cannot be defined in terms of any natural property, since it always remains open to ask whether the natural property is good.
Wittgenstein arrived in 1911, wrote the Tractatus, and left philosophy believing he had solved it.
How it argued
Logical analysis using the new quantificational logic, plus close attention to what an ordinary claim actually asserts.
What it was arguing against
British idealism, and specifically the doctrine of internal relations, which Moore and Russell attacked as making analysis impossible in principle.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether analysis reveals a proposition's real form or replaces it with another. Whether the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy.
Common misconceptions
That analytic philosophy was born as a technical enterprise indifferent to everything else. Russell wrote on marriage, war and education for the general public, was imprisoned for pacifism, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
How it began
Moore and Russell's revolt against the idealism they had been taught, around 1898, which Russell described as feeling like escaping from a hothouse.
What became of it
Living, as the founding method of analytic philosophy, though the confidence that analysis dissolves problems did not survive Wittgenstein's later work.
Lasting influence
Analytic philosophy as a whole. Logical positivism, which took the method and added verificationism. Modern philosophy of language.
Why it still matters
The theory of descriptions is still taught as a working tool, and the distinction between grammatical and logical form is basic equipment.
Put another way
A watch opened up, with each part laid out and named.
Where to start
On Denoting, with a modern commentary. Then Moore's Defence of Common Sense.
The surprising bit
Russell wrote Principia Mathematica with Whitehead over ten years, and the proof that one plus one equals two arrives on page 379 of the second volume.
In their own words
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Here is one hand, and here is another.
Connections
- Answers
- Scottish Common Sense School
- Opposed by
- British Idealism, Hegelianism
- Influenced
- Logical Atomism, Vienna Circle, Ordinary Language Philosophy
The verdict
A method that made philosophy technical, and whose most famous product was a proof that a sentence about the King of France is merely false.