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James Conant Biography

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“For Frege, an account of what it is for a purely logical power to be in act suffices to allow us to achieve a proper philosophical appreciation of what “content,” “object,” “thought,” “judgment,” and “truth,” as such, are. These notions come to be fully in place through an elucidation of that power, considered apart from our capacity to arrive at kinds of knowledge that are not purely logical in content. Our capacity for empirical judgment, when it comes into view, will come into view as a comparatively complex joint exercise of a variety of faculties, in which the logically fundamental notions that figure in its explication (“content,” “object,” thought,” “judgment,” “truth”) are still supposed to retain the specific sense originally conferred upon them in our explication of the purely logical case, while allowing for their extension to logically impure cases of thought and proposition. A certain picture of the role of reflection on the purely logical case, inthe order of explication of kinds of knowledge, is at work here—a picture that has been enormously influential on the subsequent development of analytic philosophy. On this picture, only if we are armed with a prior account of the case of purely logical thought, supplementing it as we go along, can we come to understand what empirically contentful theoretical thought (or practical thought) is. On this picture, the spatiotemporal bearing and the self-consciousness of the thinking subject do not belong to the form of thought (and hence their treatment does not belong, as Kant held, to a suitably capacious conception of philosophical logic); rather, all such further details among various species of thought are to be subsequently specified, if at all, through the introduction of further indices figuring within the content of thought. (Thoughts are simply conceived of as occurring at a time or at a person.) These consequences of the Fregean picture are not, on the whole, something for which post-Fregean analytic philosophers argue. Rather, it involves an entire philosophical picture that is simply tacitly, and largely unwittingly, assumed—a picture that is already under attack, albeit in very different ways, in both Kant and early Wittgenstein. According to this post-Fregean picture, we can furnish an account of the wider reaches of our capacity for finite theoretical cognition only by assuming the prior intelligibility of some self- standing account of how one of the ingredient capacities in empirical cognition—the capacity for logical thought—off its own bat is able to yield a delimitable sphere of truth-evaluable, object-related thoughts with judgable content, without its yet having entered into any form of co- operation with our other cognitive capacities.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“On the Kantian conception logic as a whole is concerned with investigating the form of the understanding: that is, the form of the intellectual aspect of our overall cognitive faculty to represent objects. Pure general and transcendental logic, in turn, are each concerned with investigating a dimension of that form. On this conception, the source of logical form is not to be comprehended apart from the role of our capacity for thought in the achievement of forms of cognition that are not merely logical. And the source of the notion of mere form of which pure general logic treats is not to be comprehended apart from its internal relation to the full-blooded form of that unified general cognitive capacity - and hence to the forms of the understanding or the categories. This means that on a Kantian understanding of the order of explanatory priority, we must first comprehend the inner logical dimension of form of which transcendental logic treats if we wish to arrive at a proper appreciation of how, via an abstraction, we may arrive at a proper comprehension of the comparatively outer logical dimension of mere form of which pure logical treats - that dimension of form which the rationalist logician, in accordance with his logically thin conception of reason, takes to be self-standingly available.”

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“There is certainly something to the thought that certain classic papers of Putnam and Quine offer perhaps the closest thing to be found in twentieth-century philosophy to an attempt to rehabilitate Descartes's claim that it would be hubris for us to assert of an omnipotent God that He would be inexorably bound by the laws of logic - those laws which happen to bind our finite minds. In a move which is characteristic of much of contemporary naturalistic thought (both in and out of the academy), science is substituted for God. Cartesianism in the philosophy of logic, freed of its theological trappings, becomes the view that it would be hubris for us to assert of the ongoing activity of scientific inquiry that it will be forever bound by the laws of classical logic - those principles which happen to be most fundamental to our present conceptual scheme. The contrast is now no longer, as in Descartes, between the infinite powers of man and the infinite powers of God, but rather between the limits of present scientific thought and the infinite possibilities latent in the future of science as such ... If Descartes is led by a sense of theological piety to insist that God can do anything - no matter how inconceivably it may be to us - the contemporary ultra-empiricist is led by an equally fervent sense of naturalistic piety to insist that the science of the future might require a revision of any of our present axioms of thought - no matter how unacceptable such a revision might seem by our present lights. The exploration of the contours of possibility belongs to the business of the physicists. In this regard, we philosophers must issue them a blank check - it would compromise our standing as underlaborers to put a ceiling on how much they can spend. To paraphrase Descartes on God: we must not conclude that there is a positive limit to the power of science on the basis of the limits of our own (present) powers of conception. All of its hostility to theology notwithstanding, this contemporary form of piety is, in a sense, no less religious (in its unconditional deference to a higher authority) than Descartes's - it has simply exchanged one Godhead for another. But, unlike Descartes, precisely because it is overly hostile to theology, it is able easily to blind itself to the fact that it is a form of piety.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“Charles Kahn offers the following summary of how a new metaphysics takes shape in Islamic philosophy: 'My general view of the historical development is that existence in the modern sense becomes a central concept in philosophy only in the period when Greek ontology is radically revised in the light of a metaphysics of creation; that is to say, under the influence of biblical religion. As far as I can see, this development did not take place with Augustine or with the Greek Church Fathers, who remained under the sway of classical ontology. The new metaphysics seems to have taken shape in Islamic philosophy, in the form of a radical distinction between necessary and contingent existence: between the existence of God on the one hand, and that of the created world on the other.' The new metaphysics that takes shape in Islamic philosophy proves fateful for subsequent philosophy in various ways. What will interest us immediately below is how it plays a role in triggering a debate about how to conceive divine creation. What will be of implicit interest later in these replies is how a remarkably unvarnished version of this new metaphysics comes to be detached from its original theological context. The ensuing detheologized modal metaphysics remains in force in some quarters of analytic philosophy, even though it takes its point of departure from a topic (how to understand the act of divine creation) that is no longer of much interest to most analytic philosophers. For the new metaphysics introduces concepts and ways of thinking that, once divested of their theological garb, continually resurface in the history of philosophy up to the present day.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“Even if we restrict ourselves to the comparatively limited conceptual repertoire for talking about such matters that early Wittgenstein makes available, we may already say this: in order to learn a first language, the potential speaker needs not only to learn to see the symbol in the sign, she needs the very idea of language to become actual in her. This formal aspect of what it is to be human—the linguistic capacity as such—is something that dawns with the learning of one’s first language, with one’s becoming the bearer of a linguistic practice. We touched above, in the reply to Sullivan, on how the Tractatus inherits and adapts yet a further feature of the Kantian enterprise of critique: it starts with the assumption not only that we already have the very faculty we seek to elucidate in philosophy, but also that the prosecution of the philosophical inquiry must everywhere involve the exercise of the very capacity it seeks to elucidate. The Tractatus does not seek to confer the power of language on us: we already have this and bring it to our encounter with the book. Hence, it does not seek to explain what language is (as it is sometimes put) from sideways-on—from a position outside language—but rather from the self-conscious perspective of someone who already, in seeking philosophical clarity about what language is, seeks clarity about herself qua linguistic being. Through its exercise, however, the book does seek to confer a heightened mastery of that capacity on us—a reflective self- understanding of its logic and its limits, and of the philosophical confusions that arise from misunderstandings thereof. This heightened mastery (like the general power itself) can be acquired only through forms of further exercise of that same capacity. What I just said about the Tractatus, at this level of methodological abstraction, is no less true of the method of the Philosophical Investigations. The author of the Tractatus, however, unlike later Wittgenstein, never pauses for even a moment to reflect upon what it means to learn to recognize the symbol in the sign through attending to contexts of significant use. Nevertheless, early Witt- genstein would certainly agree with his later self on this point: for the learner of language, light must gradually dawn over the whole—over sign and symbol together.”

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“Here is another way of putting an aspect of that same parallel: just as The Critique of Pure Reason seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of an object presuppose a form of synthesis that belongs to the understanding, so, too, the Tractatus seeks to show us that the formal conditions of sensory consciousness of the identity of a sign presupposes linguistic self-consciousness of the logical nexus of the symbol. Just as Kant seeks to show how, on the one hand, the understanding must bear on sensibility in order to have content (for it to represent anything), and how, on the other, the sensible manifold requires conferral of unity through the activity of the understanding to be more than merely blind (for it to amount to more than mere sensory noise); so, too, later Wittgenstein aims to show how, on the one hand, the symbol must find expression in the sign to be more than nothing (for it to say anything), and how, on the other, the form of the sign (in spoken language—its phonological form) presupposes the apprehension of its real possibilities for symbolizing (its logico-grammatical uses in acts of speech) in order for it to come into view as having the form that it does.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“How does one do justice to what occasions philosophical wonder in us without conferring false sublimity upon it? We said that what occasions Frege’s wonder—the absoluteness of the logical order—seems to him to be such that it cannot possibly be implicated in our dependence upon language: say, in our meaning to assert p in using a proposition to say one thing rather than another, or in our using just these words rather than some others to assert it. The Tractatus (while repudiating Frege’s conception that the nature of logic may in no way be implicated in that of language) still seeks a way to hold onto the idea that in logic it is not we who express, by means of signs, what we want; rather it is the nature of the essentially necessary signs—it is logic—that asserts itself. The later Wittgenstein, as we are about to see, seeks to undo this residual subliming of the logical in the Tractatus, while in no way seeking to dissipate the sense of wonder at the illimitable depth of the logical—(what he later calls) the grammatical—that shows itself in our forms of thought and life.”

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“There is no thinking the form of thought from outside of thought. This yields a very different understanding of why there is no position from which we can do something which can qualify as 'apprehending a logically alien thought ' - where this is supposed to qualify as doing something that is at the same time a case of apprehending that which we do in thinking and a case of apprehending a form of activity that is comprehensible to us, as such, only from outside (only from a position that cannot be available to us in and through engaging in that form of activity).”

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“In Frege’s conception of logic, a logical law states an absolutely general truth—one whose truth every rational being must, on pain of contradiction, acknowledge. In later Wittgenstein’s practice, a grammatical remark inherits an aspect of Frege’s conception of the logical. On a proper understanding of a grammatical remark, it articulates a truism— something that admits of no contrary—hence something that every speaker of the language must acknowledge. Or conversely, if there is something in a given candidate grammatical remark that proves to admit of disagreement, then the remark in question cannot serve its methodological role. It fails to bring into view a point of (what later Wittgenstein calls) grammar. Grammatical remarks acquire their point—that is, our need for such reminders derives—from our attempting but failing to achieve a proper reflective understanding of our way around our own language. If the grammatical remark serves its purpose, what is thereby acknowledged is something that can come into view only against the background of a prior failed attempt to achieve a perspicuous overview of our own concepts. A Wittgensteinian grammatical remark comes to life as such only against the background of a philosophical confusion. Logic or grammar for later Wittgenstein, pace Frege, could qualify as a science only if philosophy is one. This also means that, for later Wittgenstein, unlike for Frege, there is no preexisting stock of propositions that constitutes all of the logico-grammatical truths there are. In potentiality there are perhaps indefinitely many, but in actuality the only remarks that actually exercise the power to disclose a philosophico-grammatical truth, for later Wittgenstein, are those that allow us to make progress with the problems that actually vex us in philosophy.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“A conception of a cognitive capacity can qualify as unrestricted in aspiration and yet be insufficiently capacious in conception. A conception of a capacity, in aspiring not to go outside the order to which the capacity belongs so as to explain the capacity, may unwittingly frame its conception of the target capacity in terms that sever it from the conditions required for its genuine possession. This is a difficult balance to strike correctly in philosophy. Frege is concerned with not admitting anything psychological into his conception of the logical. This is the mark of the unrestrictedness of his aspiration - his refusal to admit anything external to the order of logic in his account of logic. But he builds his guardrail of protection against falling into the psychological sufficiently far in from the actual danger point that he severs the unity of our capacity for knowledge. Hence the need for a de-psychologizing of Frege's conception of the psychological.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“Just as learning to produce phonologically contoured speech and learning to hear it as such are interrelated aspects of a single task, so, too, learning to creatively project words into new contexts and to grasp the projections of those same words by others into new contexts are two aspects of a single task. What can be hard to see here is that these two pairs of interrelated capacities - to hear and produce potentially significant phonemes, on the one hand, and to detect and to project a pattern of use, on the other - are themselves no less intertwined.”

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