Analytic Philosophy in America

The leading preanalytic philosopher in America, and one of its giants of all time, was Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Having received a scientific education (including a Harvard BS in chemistry in 1863), he lectured on logic and philosophy of science at Harvard (1864–65, 1869–71) and Johns Hopkins (1879–84), after which he moved to Milford, Pennsylvania, where he continued to write prodigiously. His greatest contributions were in logic, including a syntax for quantification theory (1870) and (1883), and a truth-functionally complete system based on what later came to be called "the Sheffer stroke." Though his contributions were, in many respects, parallel to those of Gottlob Frege, the two logicians worked independently, with the writing of Frege, through its influence on Bertrand Russell, becoming the more widely known. Still, Alfred North Whitehead was an admirer whose knowledge of quantification theory was said to have come substantially from Peirce, while Hilary Putnam (1982) observed that much that is "quite familiar in modern logic actually became known to the logical world through the efforts of Peirce and his students." In 1985, W.V.O. Quine identified Peirce as sharing credit with Frege for the development of modern quantification theory, and cited his influence on Ernst Schröder and Giuseppe Peano.

Outside of logic, Peirce's philosophy of pragmatism—or, as he called it, "pragmaticism"—was widely admired. In epistemology, he was an antifoundationalist, resisting the idea of a privileged starting point of maximally certain statements (e.g., of private sensation) and adopting, as a guiding hypothesis, the idea that the application of scientific method to intersubjectively verifiable claims would, through a process of self-correction, lead different investigators to converge on a common result, no matter what their starting points. While not definitively identifying truth with that which would be confirmed in the limit of ideal (scientific) inquiry, Peirce did think that the practical consequences of true beliefs provided grounds for expecting them to be confirmed by continuing investigation. Correspondingly, he took the meaning of a theoretical claim to be its experiential "cash value"—the collection of possible empirical observations that would verify it. He had little patience with metaphysical speculation about "things in themselves" underlying observed phenomena, or grand metaphysical systems. In all these ways, Peirce exerted a strong influence on those who would follow. Peircean reverence for logic, respect for science, suspicion of apriori metaphysics, and emphasis on the practical consequences of theoretical differences found fertile soil and took root in America, creating a hospitable environment for the later growth, and distinctive shape, of analytic philosophy there.

The other great American pragmatist was William James (1842–1910). Like Peirce, James had a scientific education in chemistry, anatomy, and medicine at Harvard, where he received an MD in 1869. He taught physiology in 1872, and in 1875 he set up the first laboratory for experimental psychology in America. Between 1885 and 1907 he was professor of psychology and philosophy at Harvard, during which period he gave The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) as the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, and published Pragmatism in 1907. Though influenced by Peirce, James's outlook was less scientific, and his audience broader. Whereas for Peirce truth and meaning rested on the intellectual foundation of possible observation, for James they rested on what it is beneficial to believe. To the extent that religious beliefs help us live better lives, they pass the Jamesian pragmatic test for truth, just as scientific beliefs do.

Third in the trio of preanalytic pragmatists was John Dewey (1859–1952), who earned his PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins in 1884, where he encountered Peirce. Between 1884 and 1930, Dewey taught at the Universities of Michigan, Minnesota, Chicago, and (for the last twenty-four years) at Columbia. Like Peirce, he was an antifoundationalist and believer in the self-correcting nature of empirical investigation in a community of inquirers. Like Quine, who was to follow, he held that there are no absolute first principles that are either known with certainty or beyond rational revision in light of new experience. Truth, for Dewey, was warranted assertability. Though less influential than Peirce in the later development of analytic philosophy, Dewey's views on education, and other social issues, had a large and controversial impact.

Along with pragmatism, realism and naturalism characterized much American philosophy between Peirce and Quine. Peirce wrote in 1896, "Nothing can be more completely false than that we can experience only our own ideas. That is indeed without exaggeration the very epitome of all falsity" (Peirce, CP 6.95). The independence of the perceived from the perceiver, and the known from the knower, was emphasized in The New Realism (1912) by philosophers such as Edwin Bissell Holt and Ralph Barton Perry. As John Passmore (1957) noted, their conception of perception was similar to that given in George Edward Moore's "The Refutation of Idealism" (1903), while their rejection of "internal relations" paralleled a similar rejection, central to the rebellion of Moore and Russell against absolute idealism. (The importance of the rejection for New Realists was in their observation that when a knows b, the relational properties of knowing b, and of being known by a, are not essential to a and b, respectively.) By 1920, another brand of realism, Critical Realism, was on the scene. Advocated by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, George Santayana, and Roy Wood Sellars, among others, it struggled to reconcile the objective physical world, revealed in perception, with an irreducible Kantian residue added by the perceiver to the content of experience. Although disputes between these varieties of realism have now lost much of their force, it is striking how congenial the broad themes of naturalism, respect for science and common sense, and suspicion of idealism and other apriori speculation were to the growth of analytic philosophy in America.

The Transition to Analytic Philosophy

The American transition to analytic philosophy was mediated by several pivotal figures, institutions, and events. One such figure was Morris Cohen (1880–1947). Born in Russia, educated at City College of New York, with a 1906 Harvard PhD, he taught at City from 1912 to 1938, and at the University of Chicago from 1938 to 1941. Known for his interest in logic and the philosophy of science, he was a committed naturalist who recognized no nonscientific methods capable of attaining knowledge in philosophy. One of his students was the Czechoslovakian born Ernest Nagel (1901–85), who, after earning his BA at City, got his PhD in 1931 (under Dewey) from Columbia, where (with the exception of a year at Rockefeller University in the 1960s) he spent his career teaching and writing about the philosophy of science, and explaining the centrality of logic to philosophy. His little book, Gödel's Proof (1958) coauthored with James R. Newman, introduced the incompleteness theorems to many students, while his main work, The Structure of Science (1961), summed up the results of decades of teaching and research on the nature of explanation, and the logical structure of scientific knowledge.

Of all the transitional figures, the greatest was C. I. Lewis (1883–1964). While earning his BA (1905) and PhD (1910) from Harvard he worked with, and was influenced by, William James, Josiah Royce, and Ralph Barton Perry. After teaching at Berkeley for nine years, he returned to take a position at Harvard in 1920, from which he retired thirty-three years later, having taught many who would become leading analytic figures—including Quine, Roderick Chisholm, Roderick Firth, William Frankena, Nelson Goodman, and Norman Malcolm. He finished his career at Stanford University in 1960. An eclectic thinker and system-builder, Lewis combined an element of perceptual realism, filtered through Perry; a Kantian element, filtered through Josiah Royce; and a pragmatic element, filtered through Peirce (whose work he encountered when given the job of cataloging the latter's vast unpublished writings). Like Perry, Lewis believed that perception and knowledge require an independent reality given in experience. Like Royce he was convinced that experience is the result of structuring and interpreting the given in terms of "apriori" concepts added by the mind. Like Peirce, Lewis held that (i) our concepts—even the "apriori" ones—are not fixed by the nature of the mind but are revisable in light of experience, and (ii) the meanings of concepts, thoughts, and experience lie in their pragmatic success in anticipating and predicting new experience and grounding successful action. These ideas were worked out in his two major works, Mind and the World Order (1929) and An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946), which were among the most widely read of their day—the former being the subject of a memorable seminar at Oxford led by J. L. Austin and Isaiah Berlin in the 1936–37 academic year.

Lewis's relation to the logical positivists was ambiguous. He shared their scientific naturalism, their emphasis on logical analysis, and their view of testable consequences as the basis of empirical significance, but he vigorously opposed their noncognitivism about value, their physicalism, and their embrace of "the linguistic turn." For him, the primary bearers of meaning and truth were mental: thoughts, concepts, and experiences. Of most importance for analytic philosophy was his pioneering work in modal logic, included in his widely read Symbolic Logic (1932), coauthored with Cooper Harold Langford. Lewis's main contribution was in formulating a series of increasingly strong axiomatic systems (the S-systems) of the modal propositional calculus (with operators for necessity and possibility)—which provided the basis for (i) later axiomatic extensions to the predicate calculus by Ruth Marcus (1946) and Rudolf Carnap (1946), (ii) the fledgling semantic treatment in Carnap (1947), and (iii) the revealing model-theoretic interpretations of the S-systems in Saul Kripke (1959) and (1963). For Lewis, the philosophical moral drawn from the competing axiomatic systems was that logical first principles are not decidable apriori but must be judged by their pragmatic success—a conclusion that, no matter what its ultimate merits, was premature in light of later work. Finally, the distinction in Lewis (1946) between the different "modes of meaning of a term"—(i) its extension, consisting of things to which it refers or applies; (ii) its "comprehension" (now called its "intension"), consisting of a mapping of possible world-states to extensions; and (iii) its "signification," consisting of a concept or property determining (ii)—was an important forerunner of later developments in analytic philosophy of language.

In understanding the transition to the analytic period in America, it is important to remember that analytic philosophy is not a fixed body of substantive doctrine, a precise methodology, or a radical break with most traditional philosophy of the past—save for varieties of romanticism, theism, and absolute idealism. Instead, it is a discrete historical tradition stemming from Frege, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists, characterized by respect for science and common sense, belief in the relevance of logic and language for philosophy, emphasis on precision and clarity of argumentation, suspicion of apriori metaphysics, and elevation of the goals of truth and knowledge over inspiration, moral uplift, and spiritual comfort—plus a dose of professional specialization. All these tendencies were already present in America—preeminently at Harvard, but also at Columbia, City College of New York, the University of Michigan, and other environs. They were reinforced by repeated visits to America to teach and lecture by Moore (1940–44) and Russell (1896, 1914, 1924, 1927, 1929, 1931, 1938, 1939, 1940–42), and the addition to the Harvard philosophy faculty in 1924 of the coauthor of Principia Mathematica, Alfred North Whitehead. Each had a noticeable impact on the locals. For example, Quine—whose first great paper, "Truth by Convention" (1936), appeared in a collection in honor of Whitehead—described his 1931 encounter with Russell as his "most dazzling exposure to greatness," while his later Harvard colleague, Morton White, said that his experience of Moore at Columbia in the early 1940s was "one of the most refreshing episodes in [his] philosophical education." By then, all that was needed for America to enter the stream of analytic philosophy was for the works of its philosophers to regularly, and in large numbers, enter the torrent flowing from its British and European sources.

The Beginnings of Analytic Philosophy

The emergence of analytic philosophy in America was marked by three events above all others—(i) the arrival from Europe of leading logicians, philosophers of science, logical positivists, and other analytic philosophers; (ii) the transformation of the Harvard department led by Quine in the 1950s and 1960s; and (iii) the vast postwar expansion in higher education in America, which came to encompass a substantial drain in philosophical talent from Britain to the United States—including (for varying lengths of time) such figures as Paul Grice, Stuart Hampshire, J. O. Urmson, and Philippa Foot.

The first, and most dramatic, of these events was the arrival of an enormously gifted and distinguished group of émigrés from Europe. Among them were Herbert Feigl (1902–88), arriving from Vienna in 1931; Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), arriving from Prague in 1935; Carl Hempel (1905–97), arriving from Germany in 1937; Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), arriving from Germany by way of Turkey in 1938; Gustav Bergman (1906–87), coming from Vienna in 1938; Alfred Tarski (1901–83), from Poland in 1939; and Kurt Gödel (1906–78), arriving from Vienna in 1940.

Feigl, who studied philosophy of science and probability under Moritz Schlick, and was a member of the Vienna Circle, first taught at the University of Iowa from 1931 to 1940, and then at the University of Minnesota from 1940 to 1973. He is best known for his partnership with Wilfrid Sellars in (i) coediting the collection Readings in Philosophical Analysis (1949), which was for decades a staple in the classrooms of analytic philosophers, and (ii) cofounding the journal Philosophical Studies in 1950 as a forum for the new school of "analytic philosophy."

Carnap, the world's premiere logical positivist, taught at the University of Chicago from 1936 to 1952, with a year's visit at Harvard in 1941–42. From 1952 to 1954 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, after which he held a chair in philosophy at UCLA from 1954 to 1962. Carnap had studied logic with Frege, and Carnap's own students included such notable American philosophers as Richard Jeffrey (subjective probability) and David Kaplan (the logic of demonstratives). Among Carnap's major works published during his years in America were "Testability and Meaning" (1936–37), Introduction to Semantics (1942), Meaning and Necessity (1947, 1956b), The Logical Foundations of Probability (1950a), and "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" (1950b, 1956b).

Reichenbach, another leading positivist and preeminent philosopher of science, studied civil engineering, physics, mathematics, and philosophy—working under, or attending the lectures of, David Hilbert, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein. In the 1920s, he published several books interpreting relativity theory, and in 1930, together with Carnap, he took over editorship of Erkenntnis, the leading journal of logical positivism. In 1935, while in Turkey, he published The Theory of Probability. After moving to the United States, Reichenbach accepted a position at UCLA, where he remained until his death in 1953. Among his students there was Hilary Putnam, who was to become a leading philosopher at Princeton, MIT, and Harvard. Reichenbach's major American works included Experience and Prediction (1938), Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1944), Elements of Symbolic Logic (1947), and The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951).