Analytical Philosophy

Whether Wittgenstein altogether succeeds in explaining his own position without convicting himself of nonsense remains debated. But there is a different element in his position that requires attention: the thesis that logic has a special a priori status because it articulates the rules that make language possible. This thesis is often associated with the claim that logic is "analytic" because logical truth depends only on the definition of logical vocabulary. In fact there is a distinction here: it is one thing to hold that logic is a priori because it is integral to language, it is another to hold that logic is "analytic" in the sense that it is just true by definition. But this distinction was not drawn by the members of the Vienna Circle whose "logical empiricism" constitutes the next phase in the development of analytical philosophy. As indicated by the passage cited earlier from Carnap, a leading member of this group, their starting point was an empiricist presumption that the understanding of language is rooted in perceptual experience; but they recognized that ordinary experience does not exhibit the complex laws and structures of which the natural sciences speak. So they invoked logic to make the connections between observation and theory. In order to remain true to their empiricism, therefore, they emphasized the "analyticity" of logic, such that logic was not to be thought of as a body of abstract nonempirical doctrine but simply a way of working out the conventions of language.