Why Does Analytic Philosophy Look So Dry?

I prepared this piece for the site; it is not a course assignment. In the introduction I wrote out, one by one, where the texts in this section come from.

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In law school there is a semester that teaches you how a comma can be worth money.

A contract contains a sentence like this: “The parties share the annual maintenance and repair costs.” What is annual? The maintenance, the repair, or both? The place of the comma tells you. If it stops in one place, the repair is shared every year; if it stops in another, the repair is never shared. The difference is a roof renovation. The difference is sometimes a company.

The day you learn this, the way you look at language changes. Language stops being a transparent vessel that carries thought. It becomes a load. A rough, lopsided load with something hidden inside it.

What we call the dryness of analytic philosophy is the precaution taken by someone who sees exactly this difference.

Frege invents his own script

In 1879, in Jena, a mathematician published a book that nobody wanted.

Gottlob Frege was trying to secure the foundations of arithmetic, and he noticed that German was blocking his way. Everyday language hid the step at which a mathematical proof rested on something. Think of the sentence “Every number has a successor.” Is that a separate successor for each number, or one single successor that serves for all of them? German could say both, and it did not say which one it was saying.

What Frege did is unthinkable for a philosopher: he sat down and invented a new script for himself. The concept-script. A notation made of branching lines in two dimensions on the page. It was ugly. Typesetting it was a nightmare. Almost nobody used it.

But it achieved one thing. In that script, you could not form a blurry sentence. You could not write without saying what you meant.

The next hundred years of philosophy were born out of this stubbornness.

Is the King of France bald

What Russell did in 1905 was to press Frege's instrument against a philosophical problem, and the result was so clean that it still sits on the first page of textbooks.

Look at this sentence: “The present King of France is bald.”

France has no king. Let us say the sentence is false. Then its negation must be true: “The present King of France is not bald.” But that seems false too, because there is no king who is not bald either. If both sentences are false, one of the most basic laws of logic is cracking, and in 1905 that was no small matter.

Russell's answer was that the form in which the sentence appears is not its real form. Grammar deceives you. The sentence is not saying one thing but three things at once. There is a king. There is no more than one. He is bald.

Read this way, the problem evaporates. The sentence is simply false, because its first claim is false. Its negation opens up into two separate readings, and the two do not devour each other.

Notice that no new knowledge was discovered here. Nobody went to France; nobody searched for a king. A sentence was merely made explicit about what it says, and the problem disappeared.

This is the signature of analytic philosophy: when you meet a problem, first test whether the problem is really out there or only in the sentence.

And the beauty of it is that even Russell's clean solution did not last half a century. In 1950 Strawson came forward and said: when you utter such a sentence in everyday speech, you are not asserting the existence of the king, you are presupposing it. If the presupposition is empty, the sentence does not become false; the question of truth never arises. It is like someone asking you, “Has your child started school?” If you have no child, your answer is not “no.” You say, “I have no child.” You reject the question.

The instrument in Russell's hands could not see this difference.

The real name of dryness

Now I come to what I actually want to say.

A blurry sentence always favours its author. A text whose claim is unclear cannot be falsified. A text that cannot be falsified cannot be argued with. Faced with a text that cannot be argued with, the reader is left with two options: believe it or turn the page.

Writing clearly, by contrast, leaves the author defenceless. You frame your claim so that, if it is false, it can be shown to be false. You tell people where to strike you.

When a text is not understood, the fault does not always lie with the reader. Some texts deliberately do not show the way.

That is why analytic texts have that peculiar structure: first the thesis is stated in a single sentence, then the terms are defined, then the author builds, with their own hands, the strongest objection that could be raised against their own thesis, and only after that moves on to the defence.

Working against your own text. This is my favourite thing about the tradition.

To me it feels not like dryness but like hospitality. Like handing the person who comes to your house a sketch of the house. Here is the kitchen, here is the bathroom, this door is locked and I will explain why in a moment.

And the price

I learned to be honest from this very tradition, so let me write out the bill too.

The tendency to choose questions that can be made clear leaves out questions that cannot be made clear but are vital. Carnap went so far in 1932 as to declare most of metaphysics meaningless; reading that text today, you hear not the voice of a philosopher but of a customs officer. Someone deciding what gets let in.

The second price is technicality. When a debate goes on long enough, it turns into a room you cannot enter from outside. The terms have piled on top of one another, the literature has formed layers, and the papers are now written only for those who sit in that room.

The third is the most insidious: confusing being well constructed with being true. That an argument runs flawlessly in form does not show that its premises are true. Clarity makes a false claim clear, too. It even makes it dangerous, because now it is convincing.

The tradition eating itself

None of these three objections came from outside. All of them came from inside, and I think that is the best thing about the tradition.

In 1951 Quine took the distinction on which early analytic philosophy was built, the distinction between sentences that are true by virtue of their meaning and sentences verified by looking at the world, and broke it apart. His method was this: try to define the notion of “analytic” and you resort to synonymy; try to define synonymy and you return to analyticity. The circle closes, and there is nothing inside it.

Wittgenstein went further still: he tore down his own youthful book. In his early period he had argued that language is a picture of the world. Later he said that the meaning of a word is its use. This undermines the project of analysis. Because use is slippery, changes with context, and gives no precise boundaries. To someone looking for definitions of concepts, it says: “there may be no such thing as a definition.”

A field that declares classic a text which demolishes its own basic assumption is, at the very least, honest.

Nor is the tradition today what it used to be. Williamson argues that metaphysics asks real questions and can be pursued with rigorous methods. Glock shows that analytic philosophy is neither a thesis nor a method but a family resemblance: what its members have in common is a loyalty to certain names and a certain discipline of writing. That is to say, dryness.

A confession

My attachment to this tradition has a personal reason.

When I read with a mind whose attention scatters easily, where a text holds me determines everything. In a clearly built piece I know where I am. I can predict what the next paragraph will do. I can see where the thesis stands. There is a marker I can return to when I get lost.

In an ornate text, I get lost. For a long time I put this down to my own deficiency. I thought I needed to read more carefully, I went over the lines again and again, and there were nights when I read the same paragraph three times and understood nothing.

Then I noticed that some texts really do not show the way. They choose not to. And the name of that choice is not depth.

This is the most concrete thing the analytic tradition gave me: not automatically looking for the fault in myself.

It is the same discipline behind my citing sources in the ADHD articles on this site, writing “there is no evidence” where the evidence is weak, and putting a section called “when it doesn't work” under every method. Giving the reader the sketch. Saying where I can be struck.

Dry? Dry.

But once you have learned where the comma in a contract goes, you can never again read blurriness as innocence.