Discussions of the relation between pragmatism and logical empiricism tend to focus on the period when the logical empiricists found themselves in exile, mostly in the United States, and then attempt to gauge the actual extent of their convergence. My concern lies with the period before that and the question whether pragmatism had an earlier influence on the development of logical empiricism, especially on the thought of the former members of the “first” Vienna Circle. I argue for a substantially qualified affirmative answer.

Michael Beaney (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 1161 pp.

ISBN: 978–0–19–923884–2.

SSHAP is organizing a session at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA next week in Vancouver, in the group program on Thursday, April 2, 6-9 pm:

Other sessions of interest:

Wednesday, April 1, morning, 9-noon:

Thursday, April 2, morning, 9-noon:

Thursday, April 2, early evening, 4-6:

Friday, April 3, morning, 9-noon:

Friday, April 4, afternoon, 1-4:

Friday, April 3, early evening, 4-6

Volume 3, Number 2 is online now.

Dirk Greimann, Frege’s Performative Argument Against Truth Relativism,
Kevin C. Klement, Review of: Jolen Galaugher, Russell’s Philosophy of Logical Analysis: 1897–1905

We’re delighted to announce the publication of a new issue of JHAP.

After three years of operation, JHAP is also pleased to welcome five new associate editors and to feature a new Reviews section. Gary Ebbs, Kevin C Klement, Lydia Patton, Marcus Rossberg, and Audrey Yap are our new associate editors, in addition to Greg Frost-Arnold, Henry Jackman, Mark Textor, and Richard Zach. Sandra Lapointe remains editor in chief. The Reviews section is managed by Juliet Floyd, Chris Pincock, and Sean Morris.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 218 + xii $110 Hardcover. 

ISBN 978-1-137-30206-9. 

Reviewed by Kevin C. Klement 

There are two main interpretive positions on Davidson’s project in the theory of meaning. The Replacement Theory holds that Davidson aimed to replace the theory of meaning with the theory of truth on the grounds that meaning is too unclear a notion for systematic theorizing. The Traditional Pursuit Theory, in contrast, holds that Davidson aimed to pursue the traditional project with a clever bit of indirection, exploiting the recursive structure of a truth theory to reveal compositional semantic structure and placing constraints on it sufficient for its canonical assignments of truth conditions to be used for interpretation. This paper responds to a recent defense of a sophisticated version of the Replacement Theory by Gary Ebbs according to which Davidson was engaged in a Carnapian explication of meaning, intending to preserve only aspects of the usage of ‘means’ most important to us. I argue the Explication Interpretation cannot be sustained in the face of a detailed look at the passages that principally motivate it in “Truth and Meaning” when we take into account their local context, their context in the paper as a whole, and the context of that paper in Davidson’s contemporaneous work, and later work which tries to improve the formulations which he advanced in his early papers.

Discussions of the relation between pragmatism and logical empiricism tend to focus on the period when the logical empiricists found themselves in exile, mostly in the United States, and then attempt to gauge the actual extent of their convergence. My concern lies with the period before that and the question whether pragmatism had an earlier influence on the development of logical empiricism, especially on the thought of the former members of the “first” Vienna Circle. I argue for a substantially qualified affirmative answer.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Frege’s argument against the relativity of truth contained in his posthumous writing Logic from 1897. Two points are made. The first is that the argument is a performative version of the common objection that truth relativism is incoherent: it is designed to show that the assertion of the relativity of truth involves a performative incoherence, because the absoluteness of truth is a success condition for making assertions. From a modern point of view, the central premise of the argument, that the successful making of assertions depends on the absoluteness of truth, is highly doubtful. The second point is that this premise can be made plausible within the framework of Frege’s conception of truth and assertion: it can be derived from his thesis that, in order to put something forward as true, we do not need the word ‘true’, but only the assertoric force.

Submissions of extended abstracts (of 1500 words max) for presentation at the conference “The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia” are invited. The conference will explore the  connections between the history, members and philosophy of the Vienna Circle and the Czechoslovak region, and take place from 26th to 28th February 2015 in Pilsen, Czech Republic. It is organized by the Institute Vienna Circle at the University of Vienna and the Research Centre for Theory and Histoy of Science at the University of West Bohemia. Free registration is opened on a first-come, first-served basis.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is extended to 15th December 2014.

For more information on the conference, please see the conference website.