British philosophers of his generation. His philosophical reputation
is based partly on his studies of the history of analytical philosophy
and partly on his own contributions to the philosophical study of
logic, language, mathematics and metaphysics. The article deals first
with the historical work, then with his on-going project, concluding
with a brief discussion of his influence.
Of Dummett's historical work, it is his commentaries on Gottlob Frege
that are of outstanding importance. Frege was primarily a
mathematician, and Dummett has devoted a book to Frege's philosophy of
mathematics. More controversially, Dummett has argued that analytical
philosophy is based on Frege's insight that the correct way to study
thought is to study language. He holds that Frege advocated a realist
semantic theory. According to such a theory every sentence (and thus
every thought we are capable of expressing) is determinately true or
false, even though we may not have any means of discovering which it
is.
Dummett's most celebrated original work lies in his development of
anti-realism, based on the idea that to understand a sentence is to be
capable of recognizing what would count as evidence for or against it.
According to anti-realism, there is no guarantee that every sentence
is determinately true or false. This means that the realist and the
anti-realist support rival systems of logic. Dummett argues that we
should think in terms of a series of independent debates between
realists and anti-realists, each concerned with a different type of
language – so one might be an anti-realist about arithmetic but a
realist about the past. Dummett's main philosophical project is to
demonstrate that philosophy of language is capable of providing a
definitive resolution of such metaphysical debates. His work on
realism and anti-realism involves all of the following fields:
philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language
and metaphysics.
1. Biographical Information
Michael Dummett attended Sandroyd School and Winchester College, and
served in the armed forces from 1943 to 1947. Although he was educated
within the traditions of the Anglican Church at Winchester, by the age
of 13 he regarded himself as an atheist. In 1944 however, he was
received into the Roman Catholic Church, and he remains a practising
Catholic. After his military service, he studied at Christ Church
College, Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours in Philosophy,
Politics and Economics in 1950 and then attained a fellowship at All
Souls College. An All Souls fellowship is perhaps the ultimate
academic prize open to Oxford graduates, providing an ideal
opportunity to engage in research without any of the pressure that
comes from having to teach, or to produce a doctoral thesis within a
set period of time. From 1950 to 1951, Dummett was also Assistant
Lecturer in Philosophy in Birmingham University. In Oxford, he was
Reader in Philosophy of Mathematics, from 1962 until 1974.
His first philosophical article was a book review, published in Mind
in 1953. He has published many more articles since, most of which have
been collected into three volumes. Several of the articles published
in the 1950s and 1960s are considered by some to be classics, but, at
this time, some members of the philosophical community worried that
his published output would never match his true potential. This was
partly because of his perfectionism, and partly because, from 1965 to
1968, he and his wife Ann chose to devote much of their time and
energy to the fight against racism. In 1965, they helped to found the
Oxford Committee for Racial Integration, which soon affiliated to a
newly formed national organization, the Committee Against Racial
Discrimination on whose national executive committee he served.
However, CARD was wracked with internal divisions, and after an
acrimonious annual convention in 1967 Dummett concluded that a white
person could play only an ancillary role in the fight against racism.
He did found a new organization, the Joint Council for the Welfare of
Immigrants focussed specifically on immigration rights, but by 1969,
his work as an activist had been reduced sufficiently to allow a
return to philosophical research and he resumed the task of writing
his first major work, Frege: Philosophy of Language.
The book was eventually published in 1973 and it was a watershed in
the study of Frege. Even so, the first edition was deficient in
containing hardly any references to the text of Frege's work, a fault
that was remedied in the second edition in 1981, published
concurrently with The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy, a book
whose title is self-explanatory.
Between the first and second editions of Frege: Philosophy of
Language, Dummett also published Elements of Intuitionism in 1977 (a
second edition was published in 2000), and his first collection of
papers, Truth and Other Enigmas in 1978. In 1979, he accepted the
position of Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, which he held until
his retirement in 1992. Although Dummett has been connected with
Oxford for the whole of his professional career, he has also taught
and studied outside England. He has held various visiting positions at
Berkeley, Ghana, Stanford, Minnesota, Princeton, Rockefeller, Munster,
Bologna and Harvard. The William James Lectures that he delivered at
Harvard in 1976 were published in 1991 as The Logical Basis of
Metaphysics, his most detailed study of the debates between realists
and anti-realists. In the same year, he published his second
collection of papers, Frege and Other Philosophers, and Frege:
Philosophy of Mathematics, his long-awaited sequel to Frege:
Philosophy of Language. His third collection of papers, The Seas of
Language, was published in 1993.
The lectures he delivered at Bologna in 1987, entitled Origins of
Analytical Philosophy, were published in 1988 in the journal Lingua e
Stile. A translation into German was made by Joachim Schulte, and this
was published along with Schulte's interview with Dummett in 1988, as
Ursprünge der analytischen Philosophie. The book was subsequently
published in Italian in 1990, in French in 1991, and in English in
1993. In 1996-1997, he delivered the Gifford Lectures in St. Andrews
University, and these were published as Thought and Reality in 2006.
He also gave the John Dewey Lectures at Columbia University in 2002,
which were published as Truth and the Past in 2004. In 2001, he
published On Immigration and Refugees, which is in part a contribution
to moral and political philosophy. He has also published works on
voting systems and the history of card games, all of them subjects on
which he is an authority. He received a Knighthood in 1999 in
recognition of his efforts to fight racism, as well as for his
philosophical work.
2. Dummett and Other Philosophers
There is an intimate connection between Dummett's studies of the
history of analytical philosophy and his own contributions to the
field. Much of his own work can only be understood as a response to
other thinkers, who, he thinks, have set the agenda that analytical
philosophers ought to follow. To understand anything of his work it is
necessary to understand the significance that Wittgenstein, the
intuitionists, and above all Gottlob Frege have for him.
a. Wittgenstein: Meaning as Use
Dummett states that early in his career (before he published the work
on which his reputation rests), "I regarded myself, doubtless wrongly,
as a Wittgensteinian" (Dummett, 1993a 171). The most important idea
that Dummett takes from the later works of Wittgenstein, one which he
continues to endorse, is that "meaning is use". To know the meaning of
a word is to understand that word, and to understand it is to be able
to use it correctly. Of course, in order to be able to determine the
significance of the claim that meaning is use, we must be able to
spell out precisely what is involved in being able to use a word
correctly: this is a task to which Dummett has devoted a considerable
amount of effort.
Wittgenstein also asserted in his later works that the task of
philosophy is not to increase the sum of human knowledge, but to
release us from the grip of confused metaphysical notions by drawing
our attention to certain facts about meaning. Philosophy should limit
itself to describing what we do in other areas of life, and should
never attempt to alter our practices. Dummett states that "I have
never been able to sympathise with that idea," (Dummett, 1993a, 174)
and, as he has noted, a Catholic philosopher could hardly be content
to say that metaphysics is impossible (Dummett, 1978, 435). However,
there seems to be a connection between Wittgenstein's suggestion that
meaning is use and his rejection of metaphysics.
In Zettel, Wittgenstein asks the reader to consider two philosophers,
one an idealist, the other a realist, who are raising their children
to share their philosophical beliefs. An idealist holds that physical
objects only exist in so far as they are perceived; talk of
unperceived physical objects is merely a means to making predictions
about future observations. The realist holds that physical objects
exist independently of our capacity to perceive them. Wittgenstein
suggests that both philosophers will teach their children how to use
vocabulary about physical objects in exactly the same way, except,
perhaps, that one child will be taught to say, "Physical objects exist
independently of our perceptions," and the other will be taught to
deny this. If this is the only difference between the two children,
says Wittgenstein, "Won't the difference be one only of battle-cry?"
(Wittgenstein, 1967, 74). For Wittgenstein, to understand the use of a
word, in the manner that is relevant to philosophy, it is necessary to
understand the role that sentences involving that word play in our
lives. His claim in this case is that those sentences which
philosophers take to express substantive statements about realism and
idealism play no role whatsoever in our lives. The metaphysical
sentences have no use, and so there is nothing to be understood — they
are strings of words without a meaning. Wittgenstein's hope is that
once we see that, in a given metaphysical dispute, both sides are
divided by nothing more than their different battle cries, both
parties will realize that there is nothing to fight about and so give
up fighting.
The argument presented above for the conclusion that metaphysical
disputes are arguments about nothing does not follow just from the
doctrine that meaning is use: a necessary part of the argument was the
controversial observation that one's stance on a particular
metaphysical issue has no possible relevance to any practices in which
one engages outside the arcane practice of arguing with other
metaphysicians. This would have to be demonstrated for each
metaphysical dispute in turn. Dummett accepts that meaning is use, but
not that metaphysical problems need to be abandoned rather than
solved. Therefore, he is faced with the challenge of explaining what
content metaphysical statements have, by pointing out the exact
connection between metaphysical doctrines and other practices in which
we engage. Dummett met this challenge by focusing upon a disagreement
in philosophy of mathematics, the dispute between intuitionists and
Platonists.
b. Intuitionism: the Significance of Bivalence
In philosophy of mathematics, the term "platonism" is used to describe
the belief that at least some mathematical objects (e.g., the natural
numbers) exist independently of human reasoning and perception. The
Platonist is a realist about numbers. There are various forms of
opposition to platonism. One form of anti-realism about mathematical
objects is known as intuitionism.
Intuitionism was founded by L. E. J. Brouwer (1881-1966). The
intuitionists argued that mathematical objects are constructed, and
statements of arithmetic are reports by mathematicians of what they
have constructed, each mathematician carrying out his or her own
construction in his or her own mind. A concise statement of this case
may be found in a lecture delivered by Brouwer in 1912 (Brouwer,
1983). This process of construction involves what Kant called
"intuition", hence the name "intuitionism". Dummett does not, in fact,
find the case presented by Brouwer very convincing, relying as it does
on the idea that a mathematical construction is a process carried out
by the individual mathematician within the privacy of his or her own
mind. This seems to identify the meaning that I attach to a
mathematical term with a private mental object to which only I have
access. For Dummett, the significance of Brouwer lies not so much in
the way that he and his immediate followers argued for their position,
as in their exploration of the implications of their philosophical
position for mathematical logic (Dummett, 1978, 215-247).
From an intuitionistic perspective, to claim that some mathematical
proposition, P, is true is to claim that there is a proof of P. It is
the task of the mathematician to construct such proofs. To claim that
the negation of P is true is to claim to have a proof that it is
impossible to prove P. Of course, there is no guarantee that, for any
arbitrary mathematical proposition, we will have either a proof of
that proposition or a proof that no proof is possible. From the
perspective of platonism, whether or not we have a proof, we know that
P must be either true or false: mathematical reality guarantees that
it has one of these two truth-values. From an intuitionist
perspective, we have no such guarantee.
Consider, for example, Goldbach's conjecture, the conjecture that
every even number is the sum of two primes. So far, nobody has
discovered either a proof or a counter-example. It makes sense, from a
realist perspective, to suppose that this conjecture might be true
because every one of the infinite series of even numbers is a sum or
two primes, even though there might be no proof to be discovered. As
far as the intuitionist is concerned, the only thing that could make
it true that all even numbers are the sum of two primes is that there
be a proof. For all we know, according to the intuitionist, there
might be no proof and no counter-example, in which case there is
nothing to give the conjecture a truth-value.
The belief that every proposition is determinately true or false is
the principle of bivalence. If we assert that the principle of
bivalence holds of some set of propositions, even though we do not
know whether, for every proposition in that set, there is sufficient
evidence to confirm or refute that proposition, then our assertion of
bivalence must be based on the belief that truth can transcend
evidence. In dealing with mathematics, to have sufficient evidence to
confirm a proposition is to have a proof of that proposition. So we
see that, in the dispute between Platonists (realists about numbers),
and intuitionists (anti-realists about numbers), the realist affirms
the principle of bivalence and that truth may transcend evidence, and
the anti-realist denies these two principles.
Intuitionism is a doctrine that has clear implications for
mathematical practice: the realist considers certain inferences to be
valid which the intuitionist considers to be invalid. Suppose, for
example, we have a proof that 'P implies R', and that 'not-P implies
R'. In the form of logic favored by the realist, classical logic, we
then have a proof of R, because we can apply the law of excluded
middle, which tells us that 'P or not-P'. The intuitionist cannot
appeal to the law of excluded middle. In order to derive R from 'P
implies R' and 'not-P implies R', the intuitionist would also have to
prove either P or not-P. In virtue of these clear implications for
mathematical practice, the difference between the Platonist and the
intuitionist can hardly be dismissed as merely one of battle-cry.
Dummett has suggested that certain other philosophical debates between
realists and anti-realists should take the same form, once both sides
properly understand the nature of the debate. The example taken from
Wittgenstein concerned a debate between a realist concerning physical
objects and an idealist. According to Dummett, the idealist's
opposition to the view that physical objects exist independently of
our perceptions of them should result in the rejection of
evidence-transcendent truth and bivalence. The idealist will be
proposing some reform of classical logic, although it might not be
exactly the same as that proposed by the intuitionist, since it will
have to incorporate an account of what counts as sufficient evidence
to confirm or refute a statement about physical objects. The important
point to note is that the issue at stake will be which logical laws we
should accept. If Dummett is correct, the great insight of the
intuitionists was to realize that metaphysical disputes were really
disputes about logical laws. However, we have also seen that he does
not find the arguments of Brouwer and others in favor of this revision
of classical logic to be compelling. He thinks that the thinker who
provided the tools that will enable us to solve such disputes was
Gottlob Frege.
c. Frege and Dummett
i. Frege: the Significance of Philosophy of Language
Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) was a mathematician by profession, whose
work on the foundations of mathematics carried him deep into
philosophical territory. His ultimate goal, for most of his career,
was to demonstrate that all truths of arithmetic could be derived from
purely logical premises. This position is known as "logicism." Frege's
attempted proof of logicism was a failure, and, thanks to Kurt Gödel,
we know that no single axiomatic system can suffice for the proof of
all truths of arithmetic. In Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics Dummett
attempts to pinpoint exactly where Frege went wrong. For current
purposes, it is more important to understand the extent to which
Dummett approves of Frege's work. Dummett has probably been the most
important commentator on Frege. His interpretation of Frege's work is
by no means universally accepted, but serious students of Frege's work
can hardly afford to ignore it.
According to Dummett, Frege's unsuccessful project had two important
by-products. In order to vindicate his logicism, Frege had to invent a
language in which numbers could be defined by means of a more
primitive logical vocabulary, and by means of which statements of
arithmetic could be either proved or disproved. This Frege achieved in
1879, the major technical innovation being the use of quantifiers to
handle statements involving multiple generality. In other words, Frege
invented a formal language in which it is possible to display the
difference between "Everybody loves somebody", and "There is somebody
whom everybody loves", and to demonstrate clearly how different
conclusions can be derived from each these. This was a major
achievement, and all current formal languages rely upon Frege's method
for expressing such statements. Consequently, Frege has been crowned
as the founder of modern formal logic.
It is hardly surprising that, having used logic to investigate the
foundations of mathematics, Frege should also have been interested in
the nature of logic itself. Frege wrote a variety of papers on the
nature of thought, meaning and truth, and on a number of occasions, he
attempted to combine these into a comprehensive treatise on logic.
Dummett adopts the label "philosophy of language" for this aspect of
Frege's work, and he views it as the second important by-product of
Frege's failed project (Dummett, 1981b, 37).
Why does Dummett reject Frege's own term for this field of study,
"logic", and instead describe it as "philosophy of language", a label
whose accuracy has been disputed? Dummett rejects the label "logic"
because he prefers to use that word in the narrow Aristotelian sense
of the study of principles of inference (Dummett, 1981b, 37). That
alone does not explain why he chooses "philosophy of language" as an
alternative label, rather than, for example, "philosophy of thought."
This label is adopted because he thinks that Frege's work made it
natural for philosophers to take the "linguistic turn", and thus to
become analytical philosophers, although Dummett acknowledges that
Frege himself did not explicitly make this turn, and that some of his
statements seem to be antithetical to it (Dummett, 1993a, 7).
According to Dummett, the linguistic turn is taken when one recognizes
…first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained
through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a
comprehensive account can only be so attained. (Dummett, 1993a, 4)
As an example of how Frege's approach to philosophical questions
anticipated the explicit acknowledgement of the priority of language
over thought, Dummett refers to Frege's use of the context principle
in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, published in 1884. When faced with
the question of what number words mean, Frege invokes the context
principle, which is characterized by Dummett as
… the thesis that it is only in the context of a sentence that a
word has a meaning: the investigation therefore takes the form of
asking how we can fix the senses of sentences containing words for
numbers. (Dummett, 1993a, 5)
It should be noted that the term that Dummett here translates as
"sentence", Satz, is, in this passage, (p. x of Frege's original text)
translated as "proposition" by J.L. Austin (Frege, 1980a, x) and
Michael Beaney (Frege, 1997, 90). Dummett's translation is more
favorable to his interpretation of the context principle as a
linguistic principle than that of Austin and Beaney.
What is important, for Dummett, is that Frege does not approach the
question of numbers by focusing on what is happening inside our heads
when we think of a number. Frege, even if he did not explicitly
embrace the linguistic turn, rejected psychologism–the view that would
have us understand logic by studying private mental processes. Dummett
holds that the rejection of psychologism leads more or less inevitably
to the linguistic turn (Dummett, 1993a, 25).
On Dummett's view, the contrast between Brouwer and Frege could be put
as follows. Brouwer introspected, and found that he had intuitions of
proofs, but not of numbers. Frege focused on sentences containing
numerical terms, asking whether the numerical terms functioned as
names, and whether there was a guarantee that such sentences were all
determinately true or false, holding that an affirmative answer to
each of these two questions would be sufficient to establish that
numbers are objects, the presence or absence of any private mental
ideas or intuitions being irrelevant.
Even if the use Frege makes of the context principle in the Grundlagen
makes a turn to philosophy of language inevitable, that need not in
itself be seen as a contribution to philosophy of language. Indeed,
Dummett himself writes as follows of the Grundlagen:
Realism is a metaphysical doctrine; but it stands or falls with
the viability of a corresponding semantic theory. There is no general
semantic theory in, or underlying the Grundlagen; the context
principle repudiates semantics. That principle, as understood in the
Grundlagen, ought therefore not to be invoked as underpinning realism,
but as dismissing the issue as spurious. (Dummett, 1991a, 198)
Dummett holds that Frege did supply a semantic theory in his writings
after the Grundlagen, indeed, a few lines after the paragraph cited
above, he adds:
Full-fledged realism depends on — indeed, may be identified with —
an undiluted application to sentences of the relevant kind a
straightforward two-valued classical semantics: a Fregean semantics in
fact.
A "straightforward two-valued classical semantics" involves a
commitment to bivalence, and we have already seen why Dummett views
this as the defining feature of realism. Commentators who do not
accept Dummett's characterization of realism would not necessarily
agree with his characterization of Frege as a realist, since it is not
a label that Frege himself adopts. We must now consider what it was
that Frege added to his philosophy after the Grundlagen that
constitutes, on Dummett's view, a general semantic theory
incorporating the principle of bivalence. If the Grundlagen can be
used by Dummett as evidence that Frege's work made a turn to
philosophy of language inevitable, it is to his later writings that he
turns for evidence of Frege's contributions to philosophy of language.
ii. Frege and the Origins of Semantics
Dummett describes Frege as a realist in virtue of his semantic theory.
Frege never explicitly described himself as a realist, and never
explicitly stated that he was advancing a semantic theory. Dummett's
interpretation provides a framework for evaluating the views that
Frege did explicitly advance. To understand Dummett's interpretation
of Frege, it will be useful to see how this interpretation can be used
to make sense of the views advanced in Frege's most influential paper,
"Über Sinn und Bedeutung" (Frege, 1892). The translation of Bedeutung
has been a controversial question; a guide is given in Beaney's
preface to (Frege, 1997, 36-46). Dummett's preferred translation is
"reference" (Dummett, 1981a, 84), so that the title of the article
would be "On Sense and Reference". The standard English translations
(Frege, 1980b, 56-79 and Frege, 1997, 151-172) both include page
references to the original text of 1892.
Frege introduces the distinction between sense and reference by the
example of proper names. It is frequently informative to be told that
two names stand for the same object: it was, for example, a
significant discovery that the evening star is the morning star. In
such a case, Frege says that we are discovering that two names that
have a different sense have the same reference. They have the same
reference because they stand for the same object, they have a
different sense because, in each case, the object is presented in a
different way (Frege, 1892, 26). Frege then asserts that, in indirect
speech, rather than using a name to speak of the object referred to,
as is usual, we speak about the sense. If "the morning star" and "the
evening star" really do designate one object, then any true statement
that includes the phrase "the morning star" can be converted into a
true statement in which the phrase "the evening star" is substituted
for "the morning star" throughout. An obvious exception to this rule
would be a statement such as "Before it was discovered by the
Babylonians that the morning star is the evening star, people did not
believe the evening star was visible in the morning" (Frege, 1892,
28). Frege's claim is that the sense is that which is understood by
users of a word. When we talk about pre-Babylonian astronomical
beliefs, what is relevant to the truth of what we say is the
understanding people then had of "the morning star", and not, as is
more usual, the morning star itself.
Frege is very clear that the sense of a word is something objective:
two people grasp one and the same sense of a word, just as two people
may view the moon through one and the same telescope (Frege, 1892,
31). Frege then introduces a new piece of terminology: a name
designates its reference, but expresses its sense (Frege, 1892, 32).
Having introduced the distinction between sense and reference, Frege
then asks whether a sentence has a reference (Frege, 1892, 32). He
starts by asserting that a sentence expresses a thought. This implies,
of course, that a thought is the sense of a sentence, because what is
expressed is a sense. He also observes that when we alter the sense of
any part of a sentence, the sense of the whole sentence is altered
(Frege, 1892, 32). So, just as two people can both grasp the sense of
a particular name, they can also grasp the sense of a particular
sentence: that is, different people can think the very same thought.
Now that it is established that a sentence has a sense, and that the
sense of the sentence depends upon the sense of the parts of the
sentence, Frege argues that if the sentence has a reference, this too
would depend on the reference of the parts. If a proper name lacks a
bearer, then it will not have a reference, and one would expect that a
sentence that contains a name without a bearer would lack a reference.
Frege considers an example of a sentence that contains a name without
a bearer, a sentence from The Odyssey about Odysseus — Frege is
supposing that there is no such person as Odysseus. Frege asserts that
such a sentence fails to be true or false: what such a sentence lacks
is a truth-value (Frege, 1892, 33). This leads Frege to conclude that
the reference of a sentence is its truth-value: he states that the
True and the False are objects, and that all sentences either name one
of these two objects, or else they are names that fail to name
anything (Frege, 1892, 34).
Frege then finds further support for this conclusion. He has already
stated that if two names stand for the same object, one name may be
substituted for the other without changing the truth of what is said,
unless, as in indirect speech, we are using a name to designate the
sense that that name usually bears. Frege claims that the same applies
to sentences. When one sentence contains another as its part, the
truth-value of the larger sentence is unchanged when the sentence that
forms a part is replaced by another sentence that bears the same
truth-value, unless we are dealing with indirect speech (Frege, 1892,
36). Frege proceeds to defend this claim in the rest of the article,
analyzing particular cases.
Dummett holds that there are two guiding principles that we need to
understand Frege's work on sense and reference. The first is that
Frege is offering a semantic theory, in which the reference of an
expression is its semantic value, the second is that to understand the
relationship between a word and its referent, we must take as a model
the relationship between a name and its bearer (Dummett, 1981a, 190).
A semantic theory explains how the truth-value of a sentence is
determined by its parts. In a semantic theory, every simple expression
is assigned a semantic value, and the semantic value of a complex
expression is determined by the semantic value of the simple
expressions from which it is composed. The truth-value of a sentence
is determined by the semantic value of its parts.
Consider, for example, the expressions "George Lucas", "Gottlob
Frege", "contributed to mathematical logic", and "directed a famous
film". The sentence "Gottlob Frege contributed to mathematical logic"
is true, but the sentence "George Lucas contributed to mathematical
logic" is not true. This is because "Gottlob Frege" and "George Lucas"
each have a different semantic value, or, in plain English, "Gottlob
Frege" and "George Lucas" are not two different names for the same
person. Similarly, from the fact that "Gottlob Frege contributed to
mathematical logic" is true, but "Gottlob Frege directed a famous
film" is not true, we can conclude that "… directed a famous film" and
"… contributed to mathematical logic" do not share the same semantic
value.
Semantic theories have a role in the justification of systems of
formal logic. Dummett holds that Frege used his work on sense and
reference to justify his formal system in exactly the way that
logicians today use what is explicitly described as a semantic
explanation. Indeed, Dummett sees Frege's work as providing the
foundations for all current work in semantics of natural language
(Dummett, 1981a, 81-83).
Dummett does not just claim that Frege had a semantic theory; he
claims that he had a realist semantic theory. The semantic theory is
realist because the prototype of a term's semantic value is the object
designated by a name: a term's having a semantic value is equated with
its picking out non-linguistic reality, and the failure to pick out
non-linguistic reality would result in a failure to have a semantic
value (Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, 1981a, 404). From
Frege's perspective, if an expression lacks a semantic value, then
that really is a failure: a semantic value is something that no
expression should be without. If a sentence lacks a truth-value, that
is because something has gone wrong: all sentences should be either
true or false, because their components should all denote bits of
reality.
iii. Frege's Unfinished Business
Dummett holds that it was an important turning point when Frege
described a sentence as a proper name for a truth-value. He thinks
that, at this point, Frege lost sight of an important insight embodied
in the context principle: the importance of the sentence as the
smallest unit of language that can be used to say something. Once a
sentence is treated as just a proper name, and a truth-value as just
another object, there is no acknowledgement that there is something
special about the role of a sentence in language (Dummett, 1981a,
195-196).
Dummett is also unsatisfied by Frege's account of sense. We have seen
that, for Frege, several people may grasp the sense of one word or of
one thought, and that just as the sense of a name denotes an object,
the sense of a thought denotes a truth-value. But what is involved in
grasping a sense?
Frege's answer is that senses are neither part of the world of
spatio-temporal objects, nor do they exist inside the minds of
individuals. They belong to a "third realm", a timeless world, to
which all of us have access. Dummett is far from endorsing the
suggestion that thoughts occupy a third realm beyond time and space.
He describes this doctrine as a piece of "ontological mythology", the
term "mythology" here being used in a purely pejorative sense
(Dummett, 1993a, 25). Dummett thinks that these two loose ends should
be tied together. Rather than being content to describe the act of
understanding as involving a mysterious connection between our minds
and timeless entities known as senses, we should focus on the practice
of using sentences in a language. This, in turn requires us to think
about the purpose of classifying sentences as true or false, and that
requires that we think about the purposes for which we use a language
(Dummett, 1981a, 413). The result of this process might be to
vindicate Frege's semantics, or it might vindicate the intuitionist
position. Dummett's most influential contribution to philosophy can be
understood as an attempt to resolve this unfinished business.
3. Dummett on Realism and Anti-Realism
Along with his historical work, Dummett is known for his on-going work
on a grand metaphysical project. The aim of this project is to find a
means of resolving a number of debates, each of which has a common
form but a different subject matter. In each debate, there is a
realist, and an anti-realist, and they differ concerning which logical
principles they apply to statements of the type that are under dispute
— as it may be, statements of arithmetic, statements about the past,
statements about the future, about the physical world, about possible
worlds etc. To decide in favor of anti-realism in one instance does
not mean that one must always decide in favor of anti-realism, and the
same is true for realism.
Some of Dummett's papers deal with arguments that are quite specific
to one particular debate — for example, he discusses the charge that
anti-realism about the past is ultimately self-defeating, since what
is now the present will be the past (Dummett, "The Reality of the
Past", in his 1978), and he has advanced an argument about the nature
of names for non-existent natural-kinds that is supposed to undercut
David Lewis's argument for the thesis that all possible worlds are
real (Dummett, "Could There Be Unicorns?" in his 1993b). However, he
is best known for advancing a generic line of argument that the
anti-realist in any particular debate could appeal to. That does not
mean that he thinks that the anti-realist will always be successful.
In his valedictory lecture as Wykeham Professor of Logic, he stated:
I saw the matter, rather, as the posing of a question how far, and
in what contexts, a certain generic line of argument could be pushed,
where the answers 'No distance at all' and 'In no context at all'
could not be credibly entertained, and the answers 'To the bitter end'
and 'In all conceivable contexts' were almost as unlikely to be right.
(Dummett, 1993b, 464)
The difference between the realist and the anti-realist, in each case,
concerns the correct logical laws, because, for reasons explained in
2.2, Dummett thinks that metaphysical debates are properly understood
as debates about logical laws. Dummett's most complete statement of
the nature of such metaphysical debates, and the means by which they
can be resolved is The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Dummett, 1991b).
a. Justifying Logical Laws by a Semantic Theory
According to Dummett, to find out how to resolve metaphysical
disputes, we must find out how to justify a logic — that is, a set of
principles of inference. Logic is the study of validity — an inference
is valid if, and only if, the truth of the premises guarantees the
truth of the conclusion. The logician wants to be able to recognize
such truth-preserving inferences by their structure. More precision
can be achieved by presenting inferences in a formal system (Dummett,
1991b, 185), and precision comes to be of vital importance when we are
trying to choose between rival logical systems.
The logician wants to be able to recognize, from the structure of one
set of sentences, that the members of another set of sentences are
true. One method of validating rules of inference is by means of a
semantic theory. In such a theory, every expression is assigned a
semantic value, and an account is offered of how the semantic value of
a complex expression is based upon the semantic value of its
components. The aim of the semantic theory is to explain how the parts
of a sentence determine the truth-value of that sentence (Dummett,
1991b, 23-25), as was explained above.
At this point, it may be helpful to focus upon a particular inference
and a particular semantic theory.
Suppose that we assign the following semantic values to symbols in the
following way. P and Q stand for atomic sentences, which have either
the value true, or the value false, and never both values. The symbol
"~" when followed by a symbol which stands for an atomic sentence has
the opposite value of the value of that atomic sentence. The symbol
"(x v y)", where x and y are replaced by symbols which stand for
atomic sentences has the value true when at least one of those atomic
sentences has the value true. Otherwise, it has the value false. Next,
we consider the following argument:
(1) (P v Q)
(2) ~Q
Therefore P.
To validate this inference, we must show that if (1) and (2) are true,
then the conclusion, P, must also be true. If (2) is true, then Q is
false. If Q is false, then if (1) is true, it must be in virtue of the
truth of P, since if both P and Q were false, (1) could not be true.
So we must suppose that P is true, and that is what we were trying to
demonstrate.
In this case, the semantic theory used incorporated the principle of
bivalence: every sentence was assigned either the value true or the
value false. For reasons explained in sections 2.2 and 2.3.2, Dummett
considers this to be characteristic of realist semantics. There is no
one simple alternative to the principle of bivalence. One could depart
from bivalence in virtue of having more than two truth-values, or in
virtue of admitting that there are sentences without a truth-value, or
in virtue of believing that we have no guarantee that all sentences
will have one of the two values true or false. Just as there are many
alternatives to bivalence, there are many alternatives to classical
logic. Although Dummett's work on deduction has its roots in the
debate over intuitionism, it does not necessarily follow that, in
every case, the alternative logic advocated by a Dummett-style
anti-realist would be intuitionistic logic. The correct logical
principles should become clear once the correct semantic theory is
established.
Of course, in this case, it probably was not necessary to offer a
semantic theory in order to convince the reader of the validity of the
inference. Indeed, the astute reader might well wonder whether such a
procedure can serve to justify a logical law at all. Did we not invoke
logical laws when explaining how the inference under discussion was
justified?
The answer is that we did — but this need not render the justification
circular. Dummett is clear that he is not trying to show how deductive
practices could be justified to someone who is completely skeptical
about the possibility of deduction, rather, he is considering how we
might decide whether a particular rule of inference, which is accepted
by some logicians but not by others, is justifiable. As long as no
logical law that is under dispute is used in the semantic theory, it
will be possible to offer a justification that does not beg the
question. It is important to note that the set of logical laws that
are used in the semantic theory need not be co-extensive with the set
of logical laws that are justified thereby (Dummett, 1991b, 204).
b. The Role of Proof-Theoretic Justification
Dummett devotes considerable attention to establishing a procedure
that can be used to show that a law is beyond dispute, a procedure
that he terms "third-grade proof-theoretic justification." These are
the logical laws that can be used in the semantic theory without fear
of controversy. It is not possible to explain the procedure in full
here, only to outline the basic principles on which the procedure is
based.
As we have seen, logic deals with our ability to recognize that one
set of sentences implies that all the members of some other sentence
set of sentences are true, in virtue of the structure of the
sentences. The task of a system of formal logic is to display the
structure, or form, in virtue of which such inferences are possible.
Within such a system, the principal operator in a sentence indicates
which other sentences may be derived from that sentence, possibly in
conjunction with other sentences. For example, the symbol "&" may be
used to indicate conjunction: if it is true to assert "P & Q", then we
know that it is true to assert P and true to assert Q. When we derive,
for example, P from P & Q, we are said to be applying an elimination
rule for "&": a rule which states how to derive from a sentence which
contains "&" a sentence which does not contain "&". As well as
elimination rules, a logical constant also has introduction rules. We
apply an introduction rule for "&" if, having derived P from one
formula, and Q from another, we then assert "P & Q".
Let us assume (and this assumption is not trivial), that, whenever we
assert a sentence containing "&", that sentence could have been
derived by means of the introduction rule. Given the set of
introduction and elimination rules for "&", along with our assumption,
it will be clear that, if we add the constant "&" to a language, the
only sentences that we can now assert although we were not entitled to
assert them before are sentences which contain "&". When we derive
some new sentence from a sentence containing "&", by applying the
elimination rule, the final sentence will be one that we could have
asserted anyway. In technical terms, this means that if we extend the
language by adding the term "&", we have only a conservative
extension. Dummett is in agreement with Belnap's thesis is that if we
can show, for some rule, that adding this rule to a language involves
only a conservative extension, then we have a reason for supposing
that the addition of this rule has been justified (Dummett, 1991b,
217-220).
The assumption that, when we have a sentence containing a logical
constant, that sentence could have been derived using the introduction
rule for the constant, is referred to by Dummett as "the fundamental
assumption". It is necessary to consider, for each logical constant
whose introduction and elimination rules we wish to justify, whether
the fundamental assumption is correct for it. Consider, for example,
disjunction, "v"– that is the logical constant which is more or less
equivalent in meaning to "or". The standard introduction rule for
disjunction is that, if one can assert P, one can assert "P v Q", and
if one can assert Q, then one can assert "P v Q". To decide whether
the fundamental assumption is true in this case, it is necessary to
consider whether, if I see a child running across the street and say
"A boy or a girl is running across the street," it is always true that
I could have looked more closely, and been in a position to say either
"A boy is running across the street," or "A girl is running across the
street." It is a difficult task to spell out the precise content of
"could have", and thus a difficult task to determine whether the
fundamental assumption should be accepted for each constant (Dummett,
1991b, 270).
Even if we accept the fundamental assumption, not every alleged
logical rule involves making merely a conservative extension to the
language. Suppose we know that "If P, then Q" is true and also "If
not-P, then Q", and from this, we derive "Q". Here, we are applying an
elimination rule that does not involve a merely conservative extension
of the language, because it could be that the truth of "Q" was not
used in deriving either of the two conditional statements.
The technical apparatus for examining whether adding some constant to
the language involves a conservative or non-conservative extension is
known as "proof-theory". It was pioneered by Gerhard Gentzen, and
Dummett's third-grade proof theoretic justification builds on the work
of Dag Prawitz. Dummett's requirements are, in fact, more stringent
than that adding an operator to a language involve a merely
conservative extension of the language, because it is necessary to
take into account that two or more operators each of which, taken on
its own, involves a conservative extension might, taken together,
involve a non-conservative extension, (Dummett, 1991b, 286-290), but
we cannot discuss all those details fully here.
It must be remembered that Dummett is not arguing that we should
accept only those logical laws which can be justified by these means —
rather, he is suggesting that these logical laws are the ones which
can be taken for granted when trying to justify more controversial
principles. Logical constants that are justified by third-grade
proof-theoretic justification are above reproach. Other logical
constants may be justified, if at all, by a semantic theory.
Proof-theoretic justification is not sufficient to settle disputes
about logical laws: it is a useful means of showing that an inference
is valid, but it is less useful as a test for invalidity. The set of
logical laws that are justified by a semantic theory need not be the
same as the set of logical laws that are appealed to in explaining
that theory (Dummett, 1991b, 301).
So, we settle a debate about a logical law by offering a semantic
theory — but that just pushes the problem back one stage further; we
must still consider how to settle debates about rival semantic
theories. Dummett's answer is that just as a logic may be justified by
a semantic theory, a semantic theory may, in turn be justified by
being made the basis of a meaning-theory.
c. Justifying a Semantic Theory by Means of a Meaning-Theory
A meaning-theory is an explanation of the skill that anyone who
understands a language has. As language-users, we are faced,
continually, with sentences that we have never before encountered. It
seems that there must be some set of rules of which we have implicit
knowledge, which enable us to deduce the meaning of new sentences.
Dummett is by no means alone in seeking for such a theory: in
particular, there is a certain amount of overlap between Dummett's
thinking and that of Donald Davidson, although it would be well beyond
the scope of this article to examine the similarities and differences
between these two thinkers in detail.
One suggestion, which Davidson has advocated strongly, is that a
meaning-theory would specify a set of rules from which we could
derive, for any sentence, a knowledge of the conditions under which
that sentence is true. The suggestion is that, if you know of some
sentence of a foreign language that the sentence is true if the cat is
on the mat, and false if the cat is not on the mat, then you know that
the sentence in question means "The cat is on the mat."
Dummett endorses the proposal that this is the best suggestion
currently on offer for constructing a meaning-theory (Dummett, 1991b,
164), and notes that such a theory must be built on foundations laid
by Frege. However, he distinguishes between a strong and a weak sense
in which truth can be the central notion of a meaning-theory. In the
strong sense, meaning is to be explained in terms of truth-conditions,
as above, and it is simply taken for granted that we know what truth
is. If truth is central to the meaning-theory only in the weak sense,
then although knowledge of the meaning of a sentence is equated with
knowledge of its truth-conditions, some further explanation is offered
of what it is for a sentence to be true (Dummett, 1991b 113, 161-163).
For example, an intuitionist would say that to understand some
mathematical formula, it is necessary to be able to distinguish
between those mathematical constructions which do and those which do
not constitute proofs of the formula in question: truth is here being
explained in terms of provability. If truth is central to the
meaning-theory in the strong sense however, grasp of truth-conditions
is not explained in terms of any more fundamental notion: we are just
told that to understand the meaning is to understand the
truth-conditions, it being assumed that, for every sentence, there is
something which renders it either true or false.
The connection between a semantic theory and a meaning-theory should
now be apparent. Both the realist and the anti-realist offer semantic
theories that explain how the semantic value of a sentence is
determined by the semantic value of its parts. A meaning-theory of the
type favored by Dummett will explain how, when we see what words are
used in a sentence and the order in which they are put together, we
are enabled to understand the truth-conditions for that sentence. The
realist, adhering to the principle of bivalence, supposes that all the
sentences will be determinately true or false. The anti-realist, on
the other hand, can bring other notions into play to explain what it
is for a sentence to be true.
So, the logic is justified by a semantics; the semantics is justified
by a meaning-theory. How is the meaning-theory to be justified? A
meaning-theory is judged to be successful according to whether it
provides us with a satisfactory explanation of what it is to
understand a language. It is important to note that Dummett requires
that the meaning-theory provide us with a genuine explanation of what
understanding is. He points out that while it is, no doubt, correct to
say that someone understands the meaning of "Davidson has a toothache"
if, and only if, they know that an utterance of this sentence is true
if, and only if, Davidson has a toothache, this account fails to
provide us with a non-circular explanation of what it is to understand
the utterance. We want to be told exactly what it is to know that such
an utterance is true. Meaning-theories of this type are classified by
Dummett as "modest", and he urges other philosophers to set about the
harder task of providing more ambitious meaning-theories,
meaning-theories that are, in his terminology, "full-blooded." A
full-blooded theory offers an explanation of understanding, which does
not rely on a prior grasp of concepts such as "understanding", or
"knowing the truth-conditions" (Dummett, 1991b, 113, 136).
d. Justificationist Semantics
We are now in a position to consider the "generic line of argument"
that Dummett considers can be advanced by the anti-realist. This
argument makes use of the Wittgensteinian principle that meaning is
use. Dummett takes this to mean that there can be no element in
linguistic understanding that is not manifested in the way a word is
used in practice. When we recognize that a sentence is true, we are
manifesting that we have a certain ability — the ability to recognize
that the sentence has been verified. The same holds when we recognize
that a sentence has been decisively refuted. According to an
anti-realist meaning-theory, in which justification is central,
ability to recognize when a sentence has been decisively confirmed or
refuted is constitutive of knowing the meaning. (Dummett terms this a
'justificationist' semantics). According to the realist, knowledge of
how a sentence may be confirmed or refuted is answerable to a prior
knowledge of the meaning.
Dummett is aware that the realist suggestion is far more intuitively
compelling. However, he argues that it may yet prove to be mistaken.
He offers several arguments, of which I will summaries one. Suppose
that realism is correct. In that case, our ability to agree about what
things are yellow is dependent upon our shared understanding of what
makes it true that something is yellow. It would therefore be possible
that, tomorrow, everything which is yellow becomes orange and vice
versa, and that, at the same time, we all undergo a collective
psychological change, so that things which are really yellow now
appear to us to be orange, and vice versa. In other words, a major
change would have taken place in reality, and yet none of us would
notice it. Given that we had not altered the truth-conditions of
sentences involving "Yellow" and "Orange", we would now be making many
false utterances using these words. Yet this widespread falsity would
pass entirely unnoticed; indeed, it would be entirely inconsequential.
Our assertions would be fulfilling perfectly every purpose that they
have, and yet would be false. If we admit this possibility, it seems
incorrect to say, as Dummett thinks we should, that truth is the goal
of our assertions. Truth and falsity would have lost their connection
with practice.
Alternatively, one might argue that we would still be making true
statements using "Yellow" and "Orange", but that the meanings of the
words "Yellow" and "Orange" would have been altered. In that case,
meaning has been altered, even though there is no observable
difference in the practice, and so meaning has lost its connection
with practice.
For the anti-realist, this possibility cannot arise, because there is
no gap between what makes an assertion correct, and the most direct
means that we have of checking that assertion. Dummett does allow that
there will be indirect means of confirming a sentence, i.e., methods
for showing that, had we applied our most direct, or canonical method
of verification, it would have been successful (Dummett, 1991b,
313-314).
It is by this type of argument that Dummett hopes to persuade us to
rethink our attachment to realism. Of course, he does not think that
we will know whether to be a realist or an anti-realist about a
specific subject matter until we have a well-worked out
meaning-theory. He does not assert that in all cases the correct
meaning-theory will be an anti-realist one, indeed, he has also
offered reasons for supposing that "global anti-realism" – the thesis
that anti-realism is always correct – is untenable (e.g., Dummett,
1978, 367). Dummett's anti-realism was first formulated as a thesis
about arithmetic, and, as he points out, applying it to empirical
discourse is not a straightforward matter:
The fundamental difference between the two lies in the fact that,
whereas a means of deciding a range of mathematical statements or any
other effective mathematical procedure, if available at all, is
permanently available, the opportunity to decide whether or not an
empirical statement holds good may be lost: what can be effectively
decidable now will no longer be effectively decidable next year, nor,
perhaps, next week. (Dummett, 2004, 42)
The most extreme form of anti-realism would be the theory that a
statement about the past is rendered true or false only by evidence
available to the speaker at the time of asserting it. This would imply
that if the only evidence for the occurrence of an event is that some
individual remembers it, and that individual takes the memory to their
grave, then when the witness dies it ceases to be true that the event
took place. However, it is basic to Dummett's whole approach that
meaning is determined by how a community uses the language; an
individual acting alone cannot confer a meaning. Justification is
therefore a collective enterprise; what matters is not whether I can
verify a statement, but whether we can verify it, where 'we' are a
community that includes people who are now dead. Dummett therefore
rejects this most extreme form of anti-realism about the past as being
too solipsistic. (Dummett, 2004, 67-68)
For this reason, Dummett accepts that some concession must be made to
realism when it comes to dealing with statements about the past. He
has made different suggestions about how much should be conceded: in
his Gifford lectures, he argued that a proposition is true if and only
if we are or were in a position to establish its truth, in the Dewey
lectures that a proposition is true if and only if someone suitably
placed would have been able to do so. The latter implies that
statements concerning times before any human being existed have a
determinate truth-value on the grounds that, if someone had existed
then, they would have been able to confirm or deny such statements.
(Dummett, 2006, vii-viii) These two lecture series offer quite
different views about the nature of time.
It should be noted that the philosophical motivation for making a
concession to realism is the attempt to do justice to the manner in
which statements about the past are justified. Dummett's
justificationist approach to semantics does not imply a dogmatic
insistence on anti-realism. Rather, the he advocates a method for
spelling out what it is to grasp truth-conditions by focusing on the
way in which that grasp of truth-conditions is manifested. His central
objection to truth-conditional semantics is that they presuppose that
we know what it is for something to be true, and never explain what
constitutes such knowledge. This he regards as an act of faith that
stands in need of a rational foundation. (Dummett, 2006, 55) Whatever
concessions the justificationist may make to the realist, this central
principle is not compromised.
e. God
In his Gifford Lectures, Dummett presents an argument for the
existence of God that depends on his justificationist semantics.
According to justificationist semantics, any account of the way the
world is must be an account of the way the world is perceived by
someone. We know that different animals perceive the world in
different ways, and we aspire to break out of the limitations of
merely human perception, and perceive the world as it is in itself –
the single reality that underlies the very different perceptions that
constitute the world of dogs and the world of humans.
By means of science, we have made some progress towards understanding
the world as it is in itself – we can point to ways in which
scientific descriptions of the world are improvements on the
description based on our bare perceptions, so our aspiration to know
the world as it is in itself cannot be dismissed as an incoherent
longing. But insofar as this aspiration is coherent, "in itself"
cannot mean "without reference to the perceptions of any being."
We might be led to suppose that perceptions had been successfully
eliminated from our account of how the world is if we focus on
abstract mathematical models used by scientists, but this is an error.
Abstract mathematical models are a necessary part of science, but many
such structures exist as models for mathematicians to study. We must
be saying something further when we say of one such structure that it
is not merely an object of mathematical study, but a true description
of the way the world is. This 'something further' would include an
explanation of how to apply the favored mathematical description, and
that would mean matching the abstract mathematical description to
perceptions.
Dummett concludes that the single world that underlies the different
perceptions of humans and other species can only be understood as
being the world as apprehended by a being whose knowledge constitutes
the way things are – in other words, the world as apprehended by God.
(Dummett, 2006, 103) Dummett thinks that this demonstrates that there
exists a Creator who controls and sustains the universe, but he
concedes that it is hard to reconcile Biblical statements about God's
goodness with the presence of evil in the world. (Dummett, 2006, 106)
4. On Immigration
Dummett's work against racism was not motivated by philosophy, but it
did result in his publishing a work of moral and political philosophy
in 2001. The book, On Immigration and Refugees is aimed at a wide
audience. In the first half, Dummett defends argues for a set of
general principles concerning rights of immigrants and refugees. In
the second half, he examines the recent history of the United Kingdom
(with some discussion of other nations), analyzing the reasons why
successive governments have failed to live up to the moral standards
defended in the first part of the book.
Dummett's starting point is that everyone is under an obligation to
behave justly in the sense of giving people what they are due, which
includes the necessities for living a fully human life. He argues that
political philosophy has usually focused on the duties that a state
has to its citizens, overlooking the fact that a state also represents
its citizens to the outside world. Forming a corporation of any kind
does not remove normal human obligations, or grant any right to be
selfish, so it is immoral to congratulate politicians for upholding
the interests of their own citizens at the expense of giving others
what is due to them. One basic human right is to be a "first-class
citizen" of some state, that is, a citizen of a state whose values one
shares and where one does not face unjust persecution.
Starting from these premises, Dummett argues that there should be a
presumption in favor of the right to migrate. The state has a right to
refuse entry to criminals, or to halt mass immigration to prevent
over-population or the submergence of its culture and language. He
emphasizes that in practice, these two conditions are rarely met,
arguing that although British colonial authorities encouraged
immigration policies that submerged the native population in Fiji and
Malaya, the claim that British culture is being "swamped" by
immigrants is merely a cover for racism. He also argues that those who
are stateless have the right to become citizens of another state, and
suggests the creation of a commission run by the United Nations to
handle such cases.
5. Dummett's Influence
A few philosophers, notably Crispin Wright (Wright, 1983) and Neil
Tennant (Tennant, 1987, 1997), have attempted to extend the project of
providing anti-realist semantics for empirical language. More
commonly, philosophers have reacted to Dummett's work by attempting to
demonstrate that his anti-realist arguments are not successful. Even
if they are not, it may yet be that he has provided the correct
account of what is at stake in metaphysical disputes concerning
realism, and the correct framework for resolving disputes about
fundamental logical laws. Of course, not all philosophers who have
considered the matter are agreed even upon that. How often do
philosophers agree about anything?
This lack of agreement may not be surprising, but one of Dummett's
early ambitions was to show how philosophers could achieve agreement.
His claim was that, once the contributions of Frege are fully
appreciated, it would be possible to formulate a method for achieving
generally agreed resolutions to problems concerning theories of
meaning, and that such work should be viewed as providing the
foundations for all future work in philosophy.
He himself pointed out that the similar claims have been made for the
work of Husserl, Kant, Spinoza and Descartes, to name but a few, and
that, in each case, such claims proved false:
… by far the safest bet would be that I am suffering from a
similar illusion in making this claim about Frege. To this, I can
offer only the banal reply which any prophet has to make to any
sceptic: time will tell. (Dummett, 1978, 458)
It may be too early to judge, but so far the passage of time has
favored the skeptics rather than the prophet: there does not seem to
be a general consensus about how to resolve disputes in philosophy of
language, even among analytical philosophers. However, one does not
have to agree with Dummett to appreciate that his work is important.
His historical work has been devoted towards formulating the basic
premises that underlie much contemporary philosophy, including his
own. In so doing, he has provided a useful service for critics: those
who find themselves out of sympathy with analytical philosophy at
least know where to direct their attacks. One does not have to find
Dummett's challenge to classical logic successful to accept that it is
worth taking seriously.
It is widely acknowledged that Dummett's work is not easy to read. His
work has been influential despite this. Indeed, his influence may be
attributed, in part, to some of those factors that make his work hard
to read, such as his refusal to accept superficial solutions, and his
skill in unearthing hidden complexities. These features make for work
that is daunting to beginners, but rewarding for experts. To read
Dummett's work is to be reminded continuously that anyone who is
serious about wanting to discover the answers to deep philosophical
questions must be prepared to work very hard. That is a lesson well
worth learning.
6. References and Further Reading
Works by Dummett in English
* (Co-edited with John Crossley): Formal Systems and Recursive
Functions: Proceedings of the Eighth Logic Colloquium, Oxford 1963
(Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1965)
* Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, and Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 1st ed. 1973; 2nd ed. 1981a)
* Elements of Intuitionism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1st ed. 1977;
2nd ed. 2000)
* Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, and Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1978)
* Catholicism and the World Order: Some Reflections on the 1978
Reith Lectures (London: Catholic Institute for International
Relations, 1979)
* (with Sylvia Mann): The Game of Tarot: from Ferrara to Salt Lake
City (London: Duckworth, 1980)
* Twelve Tarot Games (London: Duckworth, 1980)
* Immigration: Where the Debate Goes Wrong (2nd ed, London, 1981)
* The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy (London: Duckworth, and
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981b)
* Voting Procedures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
* The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards (New York: George Braziller, 1986)
* Frege and Other Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
* Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (London: Duckworth, and
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991a)
* The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (London: Duckworth, and
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991b)
* Grammar and Style for Examination Candidates and Others (London:
Duckworth, 1993)
* Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London: Duckworth and
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993a)
* The Seas of Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993b)
* (with Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis): A Wicked Pack of
Cards (London: Duckworth, 1996)
* Principles of Electoral Reform (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1997)
* Grammar and Style for Examination Candidates and Others (London:
Duckworth, 1993)
* Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London: Duckworth and
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993a)
* The Seas of Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993b)
* (with Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis): A Wicked Pack of
Cards (London: Duckworth, 1996)
* Principles of Electoral Reform (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1997)
* On Immigration and Refugees (London: Taylor and Francis, 2001)
* Truth and the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)
* Thought and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
A complete bibliography of Dummett's writings may be found in Randall
E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (eds.) The Philosophy of Michael
Dummett: The Library of Living Philosophers, Volume XXXI (Chicago and
La Salle: Open Court, 2007)
Books about Dummett
* Barry Taylor (ed.) Michael Dummett, Contributions to Philosophy
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987)
* B. McGuinnes and G. Oliveri (eds.) The Philosophy of Michael
Dummett (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994)
* Richard Heck (ed.) Language, Thought and Truth (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998)
* Johannes L. Brandl and Peter Sullivan (eds.) New Essays on the
Philosophy of Michael Dummett (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1998)
* Darryl Gunson, Michael Dummett and the Theory of Meaning
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998)
* Karen Green, Dummett: Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)
* Bernhard Weiss, Michael Dummett: Philosophy Now (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002)
Other Works Cited
* L. E. J. Brouwer, 'Intuitionism and Formalism', in P. Benacerraf
and H. Putnam (eds.) Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 1983)
* Gottlob Frege, "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" in Zeitschrift für
Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 1892.
* Gottlob Frege, (trans. J. L. Austin) The Foundations of
Arithmetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950, 1953, 1980a)
* Gottlob Frege, (ed. Peter Geach and Max Black), Translations
from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Blackwell,
1952, 1960, 3rd ed. 1980b)
* Gottlob Frege, (trans. and ed. M. Beaney), The Frege Reader
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)
* Neil Tennant, Anti-Realism and Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)
* Neil Tennant, The Taming of the True (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997)
* Ludwig Wittgenstein, (ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von
Wright; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe), Zettel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967)
* Crispin Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell,
1987, 2nd ed. 1993)
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