Panayot Butchvarov

Knowledge Of Meanings And Knowledge Of The World

One of the most characteristic (and certainly most original) claims of the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as the philosophy of ordinary language, is that traditional philosophical discourse has usually been logically improper because it has depended upon systematic misuses of certain expressions in ordinary language and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with the description of the actual use of language. To substantiate this claim, the philosopher of ordinary language has had to establish at least the following two general philosophical theses, which together seem to constitute the hard core of original doctrine in the philosophy of ordinary language. First, that the meaning of an expression is its use and not its referent or what it corresponds to. Second, that the description of the uses of certain expressions in language is not merely a study of words but genuinely solves the same problems which traditional philosophy had tried to solve through other methods.

Generic Statements and Antirealism

The standard arguments for antirealism are densely abstract, often enigmatic, and thus unpersuasive. The ubiquity and irreducibility of what linguists call generic statements provides a clear argument from a specific and readily understandable case. We think and talk about the world as necessarily subject to generalization. But the chief vehicles of generalization are generic statements, typically of the form “Fs are G,” not universal statements, typically of the form “All Fs are G.” Universal statements themselves are usually intended and understood as though they were only generic. Even if there are universal facts, as Russell held, there are no generic facts. There is no genericity in the world as it is “in-itself.” There is genericity in it only as it is “for-us.”

Saying and Showing the Good

Wittgenstein’s distinction in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus between what can be said and what can only be shown provides a welcome alternative to the stark choice between contemporary realism and anti-realism.1 It concerns what he thought was “the cardinal problem of philosophy.” One may ask, “What are those things that can only be shown?” But the question misses the point of the distinction. What can only be shown is not a part of reality. But neither is it unreal.

States of Affairs

I shall devote this paper mainly to asking questions. The questions I shall ask call for explanations, elucidations, of some of the crucial notions in Professor Chisholm’s recent writings on ontology and the theory of intentionality. (He holds, in my opinion correctly, that these two branches of philosophy are inseparable.) An early version of Part I was read at a symposium held at the December 1982 meetings of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, as comments on Chisholm’s “Converse Intentional Properties”, which was one of the main papers. I thank Chisholm for his gracious and valuable replies but regret that I have not been able to accept all of them.

Being Qua Being: A Theory of Identity, Existence, and Predication.

Are there nonexistent things? What is the nature of informative identity statements? Are the notions of essential property and of essence intelligible, and, if so, how are they to be understood? Are individual things material substances or clusters of qualities? Can the account of the unity of a complex entity avoid vicious infinite regresses? These questions have attracted widespread attention among philosophers recently, as evidenced by a proliferation of articles in the leading philosophical journals. In Being Qua Being they receive systematic, unified treatment, grounded in an account of the nature of the application to the world of our conceptual apparatus. A central thesis of the book is that the topic of identity is primary, and that existence and predication, both essential and accidental, are to be understood in terms of identity.