User:Trossi01/Analytic philosophy

History
The history of analytic philosophy (taken in the narrower sense of "20th-/21st-century analytic philosophy") is usually thought to begin with the rejection of British idealism, a neo-Hegelian movement. British idealism as taught by philosophers such as F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) and T. H. Green (1836–1882), thrived in the late 19th century.

Analytic philosophy moreover developed from the British tradition of empiricism as well as from developments in other fields of natural sciences such as physics. Amongst this the development of symbolic logic became a core aspect of the analytic tradition. Analytic philosphy may be best described as a methodology as opposed to a doctrine. Those engaging in these methods analyze problems, concepts, issues, and arguments by breaking them down into their component parts.

Bertrand Russell is credited with being a major influence in the creation of analytic philosophy, having spearheaded the type of symbolic logic that would be used by philosophers as well as bringing attention to Frege and Wittgenstein. The symbolic logic that Russell contributed to the field was built upon Frege's earlier ideas. Russell, during his early career, along with his collaborator Alfred North Whitehead, was much influenced by Gottlob Frege's (1848–1925) system of predicate logic which allowed a much greater range of sentences to be parsed into logical form.

Frege was also influential as a philosopher of mathematics in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Frege argued that mathematics and logic have their own validity determined by their truth-values, independent of the judgments or mental states of individual mathematicians and logicians. Frege further developed his philosophy of logic and mathematics in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (German: Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893–1903), where he provided an alternative to psychologistic accounts of the concept of number.

Like Frege, Russell argued that mathematics is reducible to logic in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). Later, his book written with Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), played a large role in the development of modern mathematical logic. Additionally, Russell adopted Frege's predicate logic as his primary philosophical method, a method Russell thought could expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems. For example, the English word "is" has three distinct meanings which predicate logic can express as follows:


 * For the sentence 'the cat is asleep', the is of predication means that "x is P" (denoted as P(x)).
 * For the sentence 'there is a cat', the is of existence means that "there is an x" (∃x).
 * For the sentence 'three is half of six', the is of identity means that "x is the same as y" (x=y).

Russell sought to resolve various philosophical problems by applying such logical distinctions, most famously in his analysis of definite descriptions in "On Denoting" (1905).

Ideal language
Main article: Ideal language philosophy

From the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, analytic philosophers like Frege, Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein sought to create a logically perfect language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language that, in their opinion, often made philosophy invalid. This ideal language is built upon symbolic logic in an attempt to remove ambiguity and vagueness that is present in natural languages such as English.

In his second lecture of "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" Russell outlined the criteria that an ideal language must satisfy. Russell states that words in a logically perfect language would be entirely analytic and would display the logical structure of the facts being asserted or denied. Such a language would consist of a 1-to-1 relationship between propositions and their corresponding facts, only one word for each simple object, and all non-simple objects would be expressed through combinations of words. Russell argues that the system of symbolic logic proposed in Principia Mathematica fulfills the criteria he outlines and would remove the vagueness and ambiguity of natural language while being closely related to natural language to allow for adequate representation of different types of sentences.

Logical atomism
Russell developed a metaphysics and philosophy of language known as logical atomism based on his system of symbolic logic. Logical atomism essentially states that the world is made up of parts. Each of these parts either consists of particular qualities or stands in relation to other parts. Russell argues that an analysis of language reveals that language is made up of atomic and molecular propositions. Atomic propositions are the simplest form of complete sentences that contain a single predicate or verb which represents a quality or a relation. It additionally must contain the appropriate number of proper names which represent an individual. For example, "This is red," states that "this" has the quality of being red. With that, an atomic fact is the simplest form of a fact and asserts that something consists of a specific quality and makes a statement about the world.

Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German: Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921). He thereby argued that the universe is the totality of actual states of affairs and that these states of affairs can be expressed by the language of first-order predicate logic. Wittgenstein argues that the elements of a picture represent elements of the real world. For instance, the famous picture of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon represents the American flag being placed in a specific position, with Neil Armstrong positioned to the right of the flag. Pictures such as this are made up of specific parts consisting of particular qualities within themselves as well as relations to other parts around them which is what makes up the entirety of the picture. As pictures are meant to represent the real world, Wittgenstein argues that the world is similarly made up of a collection of parts that share fixed relations with one another.

Logical positivism
Main article: Logical positivism

During the late 1920s to 1940s, a group of philosophers of the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Circle developed Russell and Wittgenstein's formalism into a doctrine known as "logical positivism" (or logical empiricism). Logical positivists typically considered philosophy as having a minimal function. For them, philosophy concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own. Often a critique of published philosophical works, logical positivism asserts that logic and math in conjunction with observational findings are the only paths to gaining human knowledge, and any attempts lacking these criteria are considered nonsensical, or lacking sense. The positivists adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or is capable of being verified by experience. This caused the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless. Thus, according to these thinkers, philosophy cannot add new knowledge, but rather exists only to clarify findings of the sciences.

Philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, along with other members of the Vienna Circle, claimed that the truths of logic and mathematics were tautologies, and those of science were verifiable empirical claims. That is, logical and mathematical truths did not express any truth but rather are completely void of content. For example, "it is raining or it is not raining" does not express any factual information about the world. These two constituted the entire universe of meaningful judgments; anything else was nonsense. The claims of ethics, aesthetics, and theology were consequently reduced to pseudo-statements, neither empirically true nor false and therefore meaningless as the Vienna Circle deemed for any statement to be meaningful it must be empirically testable.

In reaction to what he considered excesses of logical positivism, Karl Popper insisted on the role of falsification in the philosophy of science—although his general method was also part of the analytic tradition. With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1933, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled to Britain and the US, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in anglophone countries.