What Have We Learned from Philosophy in the Twentieth Century?

Abstract

This chapter discusses some lessons learned from philosophy in the 20th century. One of these is that the fundamental bearers of the properties of truth or falsity, the fundamental subjects of the predicates ‘true’ or ‘false’, are not linguistic items, neither sentences nor utterances of sentences. It is not, when we speak or write, the words we then use, but what we then use them to say, that is in question. It is whatever may be believed, doubted, hypothesized, suspected, supposed, affirmed, denied, declared, alleged, and so forth, that is, or may be, true. The views of Paul Grice are also considered: his emphasis on the value of consulting our great dead predecessors; the doctrine of the unity of philosophy across apparent departmental divisions; and his opposition to ‘Minimalism’ in philosophy, a heading under which he ranged a number of other ‘isms’, including ‘physicalism’ and ‘extensionalism’.