Hilary Putnam
AFTER AVER, AFTER EMPIRICISM
If
any problem has emerged as
the
problem for analytic
philosophy in the twentieth century, it is the problem of how words
"hook onto" the world . The difficulty with A . J. Ayer, who has tried,
in his recent book, to sum up philosophy in the twentieth century is
that there is no acknowledgement of the difficulty of this problem .
A. J. Ayer's
Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
is pleasant and
useful reading in its first half. One encounters William James , C.
I.
Lewis , Bertrand Russell, G . E. Moore, and such lesser Oxford fig–
ures as W . D. Ross and H . A. Pritchard, presented as they struck
Ayer in his youth or as they influenced his philosophical life and not
just as he now regards them (although he tells us that as well) . Ayer's
des"cription of the Wittgenstein of the
Tractatus
is likewise pleasant
and useful to read. But beginning with the section on the later Witt–
genstein the book becomes, for the most part, disappointing.
It
is obvious that something happened in philosophy after the
Tractatus
with which Ayer is profoundly out of sympathy . And while
he tries to present what happened conscientiously - and he is cer–
tainly fair-minded - he curiously fails to tell the reader
what
it is that
he is unable to sympathize with : perhaps he does not know himself.
The result is that a reader who had only this book to go by would
have to see philosophy after the early Wittgenstein as, for the most
part, a series of empty and confused ideas and arguments. Even the
exposition becomes untrustworthy . My own views (with which Ayer
concludes) are misrepresented (I do not hold that it is inconceivable
that one could discover that water is not H
2
0) as are, for example,
those of David Armstrong, the representative of contemporary ma–
terialism that Ayer chooses. Ayer charges Armstrong with denying
the existence of "appearances ," i.e . , sense data. But Armstrong is
quite clear on this point: he believes in the existence of appearances,
but he does not take
appearance-concepts
as primitive and unanalyz–
able . Rather he regards appearances as functionally characterized
brain-events.
If the book only half succeeds in its aim to be a sequel to Rus–
sell's
A History of Western Philosophy,
it succeeds better in giving a pic–
ture of Ayer as a philosopher. From the time he first appeared on the
