From a Philosophical Point of View: Selected Studies

Chapter 1
PROLOGUE TO A PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE (2002)
I BEGAN MY serious philosophical thinking under the influence of several major currents of thought, among them the pragmatism of John Dewey and the analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore. I found Moore a persuasive advocate of the view that the philosopher should analyze extralinguistic concepts, attributes, or propositions, and arrive at truths that are analytic and not dependent on experience for their support; but I soon discovered that Moore was unsure about the notion of analysis that underlay his main philosophical efforts, because he had developed serious doubts about the idea of an analytic statement. At about the same time, I came to know Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine, who, in reaction to their mentors--C. I. Lewis in Goodman's case and Carnap in Quine's--did not seek analyses of intensional entities such as concepts, attributes, and propositions, because they thought that reference to such entities was obscure and because they had no clear notion of how their identity was to be established. Sharing these doubts, I came to think that the philosopher's task is an empirical enterprise requiring an examination of how we do and should use language rather than an effort to decompose concepts.
Soon afterward, Quine, Goodman, and I concluded that the search for an empirical criterion of synonymy and therefore of analyticity was hopeless, and that if one ever did emerge, it would make the distinction between analytic and synthetic a matter of degree. I was also encouraged in this belief by Dewey's epistemological gradualism and by the epistemological holism of the logician Alfred Tarski, who held that logical statements may be components of conjunctions tested by experience. Around the middle of the twentieth century, study of Wittgenstein's later works, with their emphasis on the need for the philosopher to recognize the many different uses of language, as well as contact with J. L. Austin reinforced my view that philosophy is primarily a study of language and led me to think that Mooreian analysis of concepts was a remnant of classical rationalism from whose influence even James and Dewey did not wholly escape.
Once I had shed the vestiges of rationalism in my own thinking, I came to see more clearly that Dewey was right to claim that much of the history of philosophy had been a fruitless quest for certainty; but I also saw that even he, perhaps under the influence of logical positivism, had unconsciously participated in that quest in his later writings when he accepted something like a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic statements in his Logic. At about this time, I was writing a book on American social thought that focused on what I called the revolt against formalism in the work of Dewey, the jurist Holmes, and others, so I was much interested in cultural history, which was certainly an empirical discipline. Thus the two souls within my breast--the philosopher and the historian--were epistemically united. I tried to bring them together in a book on the philosophy of history, where I concentrated on the language of explanation and narration, with special attention to the roles of generalization and valuation in historical inquiry.
Soon after that I began thinking seriously about Quine's view that epistemology is a branch of psychology; this line of thought led me to believe that the philosopher may view moral thinking in a holistic way and therefore should not limit holism to thinking in natural science. From this I concluded that Quine was on the wrong track when he said, as Carnap had, that philosophy of science is philosophy enough. I also came to realize that James's psychologically oriented investigations of religious experience and Dewey's of artistic creation were philosophical even though they were not exclusively concerned with language, and I saw the error of Wittgenstein's view in his Tractatus that "Psychology is no nearer related to philosophy than is any other natural science."1 This position allowed me to see that philosophy of religion, philosophy of art, philosophy of law, philosophy of history, and philosophy of politics are coordinate with the philosophy of natural science, thereby buttressing a view I had already expressed. In an essay published in the early 1950s,2 I had observed that although there were many mansions in philosophy, the more splendid ones housed metaphysics, logic, epistemology, and ethics, which lived on a commanding hilltop, while somewhere downtown were the two-family dwellings for political philosophy and jurisprudence, the small apartments for esthetics, and the boardinghouses for philosophers of the special sciences.