Conceptual Schemata and Metaphysics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Peter Strawson

Author: Ying Qi / Country:
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-12-01
Features: Strawson's metaphysical thought is primarily reflected in his representative work Individuals. In terms of writing style, research methods, and overall objectives, Individuals differs from Strawson's early works. The fragmentary study of everyday language, which played an important role in his early works, no longer dominates this book but serves as a supplementary tool to address major traditional metaphysical problems. That is to say, Individuals reflects a tendency to shift from fragmented and detailed linguistic analysis to more general and comprehensive philosophical reasoning. Limits of Meaning can be considered parallel to Individuals. In this book, Strawson re-examines Kant's Critique of Pure Reason against the backdrop of the linguistic turn, exploring the general conceptual framework in human thought or attempting to extract the universal conceptual scheme from Kant's thought. The goal is consistent with that of Individuals. Additionally, Suspicion and Naturalism is a summary of the essence of Strawson's thought, while Analysis and Metaphysics focuses on his overall conception of philosophy. Although the emphasis on descriptive metaphysics is a consistent feature of Strawson's later thought, some of the ideas in Individuals have already been proposed in his early works, particularly in his critique of Russell's theory of descriptions in the essay On Referring (1950) and other philosophical logical writings. It can be said that Strawson's debates with Russell and Quine laid a direct foundation and preparation for the development of his own thought. Therefore, to better understand the contemporary context of Strawson's philosophy, this book will devote significant to examining these two debates. The focus of this introduction is to briefly examine Strawson's reflections on philosophical methods, his general explanation of descriptive metaphysics, and his overall conception of philosophy.
I. Philosophical Methods: Analysis and Construction
Generally, the main difference between the ordinary language school and the artificial language school (also known as the ideal language school) in linguistic analysis lies in the fact that the artificial language school emphasizes logical analysis when engaging in linguistic analysis, using modern symbolic logic as the primary research tool to analyze language from a logical perspective; while the ordinary language school does not primarily rely on symbolic logic when conducting linguistic analysis, nor does it approach it from a logical perspective, but rather from a linguistic perspective to study the subtle differences in the use of words. However, for Strawson, a philosopher of the ordinary language school and one of the advocates of philosophical logic in Britain, the situation seems to be different. As a philosopher of the ordinary language school, he not only does not exclude the linguistic analytical methods of the artificial language school but also uses artificial language methods to develop ordinary language philosophy. He advocates combining the two analytical methods and incorporating them into the framework of the tasks he has set for philosophy. The original and innovative work of Strawson on the structure of everyday language is based on this understanding.
An important text on Strawson's reflections on philosophical methods is his essay Construction and Analysis (1956), which was originally a lecture script for a series of introductory lectures on modern philosophy broadcast on the BBC, later included in Ayrer's edited book The Revolution in Philosophy. In this essay, Strawson first compares the two linguistic analytical methods. He points out that the linguistic analytical method of the artificial language school was primarily adopted by American philosophers after World War II, so Strawson also refers to it as the "American school" method. The main inspiration of this school comes from the new logic of Frege and Russell, as this logic provides a framework language where each element is defined with absolute precision, and the connections between elements are also absolutely clear. By using this framework, this basic linguistic tool, other conceptual systems can be constructed. This artificially constructed language system has a precise and rigorous structure, which can be linked to the loose, chaotic, and rough natural language, thereby revealing the structure of our thought hidden in natural language. Precisely in this fact lies the philosophical superiority of systematic construction over the analysis of everyday language. Therefore, the linguistic analytical method of the artificial language school is essentially a "systematic construction" method or simply a "construction" method, the advantage of which lies in bringing clarity and order to chaos and imprecision. "It is not only attractive but also seems very reasonable. Many things become better understood after their functions are constructed into a simple model." That is to say, the task of descriptive metaphysics does not lie in explaining the rules of everyday categories and words but in revealing and exploring the basic structure of everyday language as a whole. Furthermore, descriptive metaphysics does not necessarily have to be limited to the categories already recognized in traditional metaphysical thought; its criterion should be to exclude any prejudice about which concepts occupy a foundational position in such a structure and to directly study the structure of the everyday language we discover. In such research, nature must conform to the subtle distinctions depicted by the grammar of our functional language and the universal needs for experiential communication among people.
At the beginning of Individuals, Strawson briefly outlines the basic idea of descriptive metaphysics: "We believe that the world includes particular things, some of which are independent of us; we believe that the history of the world consists of particular events (episodes) that we may or may not have participated in; we believe that these particular things and events are included in our everyday discourse, and they are the things we can talk about with each other. These are the views about how we think about the world, about our conceptual scheme. To express these views in a more philosophical, though not clearer, way, that is our metaphysics."
From this, it is clear that Strawson's descriptive metaphysics includes three levels: the structure of the world, the structure of thought (conceptual scheme), and the structure of language, and these three are interwoven and integrated in his research, which is also fundamentally consistent with his overall conception of philosophy in Analysis and Metaphysics.
Regarding the structure of the world, Strawson believes that what exists in the world are particular things, including historical events, objects, people, and their shadows, which he calls particulars, while qualities, properties, numbers, and species are not particulars. Strawson's metaphysics fundamentally only acknowledges the existence of individual things, which is his basic metaphysical stance. However, as an opponent of the reductionist ontology, Strawson also acknowledges the existence of universal things (called universals in traditional philosophy) in a subordinate sense, such as the qualities and properties, numbers and species mentioned above. In this sense, Strawson's work can be understood as providing new theoretical grounds for the view that special and concrete things hold a primary position in ontology, as advocated by Aristotle and Frege. Such a world structure is reflected in our thought structure as the so-called conceptual scheme. For Strawson, basic particulars, particulars, and universals are the essential components of the conceptual scheme, and we use these categories to think about the world. Basic particulars are used to think about individuals existing in the observable public reference framework, i.e., the spatial and temporal system, such as objects and people. Particulars are used to think about all particular things, while universals are used to think about universal things.
After the so-called "linguistic turn," language becomes the primary issue, and the perspective of language becomes the fundamental starting point for solving all philosophical problems, whether the structure of the world or the structure of thought, must be observed and studied from the perspective of the structure of language. Descriptive metaphysics is precisely, in its spiritual essence, a doctrine about the structure of language, and ontology is also what our everyday discourse commits to. It should be noted that in terms of the basic stance of philosophical ontology, Aristotle's argument in the Categories about the idea that individual things are the substratum inspired Strawson greatly. Strawson believes that Aristotle's view that individuals existing in space and time, such as individual people or horses, are the basic objects of reference and the basic subjects of predication is correct, and the problem lies in answering why it is correct and what its significance is. From Strawson's argument on this point, descriptive metaphysics follows the traditional philosophy's connection between the distinction between particulars and universals and the distinctions between subject-predicate and reference-predication or description, taking the distinction between particulars and universals as the foundation to examine the two basic distinctions and their interrelationships, namely subject-predicate and reference-predication or description, and attempts to grasp the deep structure of everyday language.
As a philosopher of the ordinary language school, Strawson does not necessarily believe that the grammar of everyday language is misleading. Unlike the artificial language school, which opposes the opposition between the grammatical form and logical form of language, Strawson argues that the structure of grammatical expressions is consistent with the structure revealed by metaphysics, and the latter is merely a reconstruction of the former. Strawson reconstructs the two distinctions, subject-predicate and reference-predication or description, which grammar reveals, using the distinction between particulars and universals, thereby also arguing for the basic tendency of his ontology.
Like being, "object" is also an artificial term. In everyday language, we are accustomed to using this word for material objects other than people. Tugendhat points out that the philosophical term "object" refers not to what we usually call objects but to the basis of what "something" (something) means in our everyday language. Therefore, "object" refers to every thing that can be called "something." However, this form is defective linguistically. Because "something" is not a predicate but an indefinite pronoun. But before the "linguistic turn," traditional philosophy was full of such discussions, and Aristotle even created an expression "athis" (todeis) for "object." Tugendhat argues that to avoid such grammatically incorrect expressions, a deeper exploration of the linguistic background is needed to find expressions that represent objects or something, such as those that serve as the subject of singular predicative statements, logically called "singular terms." Tugendhat, based on Dummett's interpretation of Frege, provides the following standard for what a singular term is: an expression x, together with another expression, forms a complete assertive sentence, and in another sentence derived from this sentence, the expression x is replaced by "something" or "somebody," then the expression x is a singular term.
It is very clear that the application pattern of singular terms is closely related to the pronoun expressions that can replace them (something, which, the same). For each of these pronouns, we can add "object," for "which," we have "which object," for "the same," we have "the same object," and for "something," we have "some objects." And once the term "object" is used so broadly, that is, if its meaning is derived from the use of these pronouns or singular terms that can replace them, then it will have a broad meaning in philosophy and even be directly linked to "being," because for every thing or anything we can say "it is" means "whatever something may be at any rate it is."
Therefore, Aristotle's concept of "being" is not only closely related to "unity" but also to "something" (something, ti). "This connection—each being is also something and one, and vice versa—has been preserved in the names ens, unum, aliquid of scholasticism."