The Metaphysics of Meaning

by Jerrold J. Katz

Jerrold J. Katz offers a radical reappraisal of the "linguistic turn" in twentieth-century philosophy. He shows that the naturalism that emerged to become the dominant philosophical position was never adequately proved. Katz critiques the major arguments for contemporary naturalism and develops a new conception of the naturalistic fallacy. This conception, inspired by Moore, explains why attempts to naturalize linguistics and logic, and perhaps ethics, will fail. He offers a Platonist view of such disciplines, justifying it as the best explanation of their autonomy, their objectivity, and their normativity. Jerrold J. Katz is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics, Metaphysics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Arthur Drury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth the read for his sophisticated contrarian history of analytic philosophy alone. For example, a very interesting argument that the proper study of philosophy is the synthetic a priori. In particular, Katz makes the dispute between philosophical naturalism and anti-naturalism very clear.

I think it's fair to say that naturalists like Dennett et al. take evolutionary biology as their paradigm. Their position is that more and more of the philosophical landscape looks like, say, "species" in biology: gradual, fuzzy, not a question of bright lines or essences. E.g., species, rational animal, consciousness, free will, and meaning in a natural language. In fact, working mathematicians like Timothy Gowers & Eugenia Cheng even describe the development of mathematical concepts in similarly inessential ways. What's the "essence" of a mathematical concept? They say it's more or less the use working mathematicians can make of it.

Against the naturalists, at a certain level Katz here just asserts anew the old essentialist paradigm. He certainly demonstrates that he can make sense, he can talk sensibly about intensional objects. And he clearly shows that naturalists are caught in some tangles. But it's really just the conservative old guard calmly & clearly explaining the old orthodoxy as if the revolutionaries don't grok what they oppose.

Also, in the end there's a kind of irony. Katz's goal is to vindicate good old-fashioned metaphysics (abstract objects, propositions, universals, etc.) against anti-metaphysical naturalists like Wittgenstein, Dennett, et al. Katz's tactic is to show that, in the course of the linguistic turn, anti-metaphysical philosophers have failed to understand the implications of a particular science, viz. linguistics (understood as a formal science, like math and logic). But, ironically, it seems the success of that tactic must lead to a strategic check. Dennett et al. might respond that if Katz were right (in his claim that certain philosophers are wrong because they don't get the science) it would only show once again the futility of philosophy and the superiority of science.