Realism, speech-acts, and truth-gaps in Indian and Western philosophy

Abstract

The mode of philosophizing called 'analytic philosophy' has been fashion able in the Anglo-American world for several decades. Sired by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, it has been practised by such eminent thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, W. V. O. Quine, Nelson Goodman, J. L. Austin and Peter Strawson. The program of analytic philosophy is to resolve philosophical puzzles by clarifying the language generating those puzzles, either by direct attention to ordinary language or by constructing an ideal or artificial language in which the puzzle does not arise. It is safe to say that nowadays the bulk of the papers published in philosophy journals and read at conferences of professional philosophers in Britain and the U.S.A. are in the analytic tradition. Yet when one asks an analytic philosopher to provide a good example of successful clarification of a puzzle by analytic means, the philosopher may be hard pressed to provide one. Indeed, for many years just one bit of analysis was easily identifiable as an impressive example of the sort of thing aimed at by analytic philosophers. This is what has come to be known as 'Russell's Theory of Descriptions'. Bertrand Russell, in a paper published in 1905, argued that, e.g., the sentence