HILARY PUTNAM
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closed system, its "states," and the Equations of Motion - to give us
"abilities to produce"; let alone a relation of "correspondence" be–
tween signs and objects.
In a way, Ayer's problem comes from Hume's project of
analyzing causal talk into two parts: one part (the regularities) which
is "objective," and one (the "necessity") which is nothing but a human
projection (even if such projections are
indispe~sable
in practice). Both
Ayer and the materialists are trying to carry out Hume's project of
telling us what "really exists" (sense-qualia and their relations, in
Ayer's view, until material objects got added on as a "causal hy–
pothesis"; the closed system and its "states" in the materialist view),
and what is only a "human projection." I want to suggest, as I think
the later Wittgenstein was suggesting, that this project is now a total
shambles. Analytic philosophy has great accomplishments, to be
sure; but those accomplishments are negative. Like logical pos–
itivism (itself just one species of analytic philosophy), analytic
philosophy has succeeded in destroying the very problem with which
it started. Each of the efforts to solve that problem, or even to say ex–
actly what could
count
as a solution to that problem, has failed.
This "deconstruction" is no mean intellectual accomplishment.
We have learned an enormous amount about our concepts and our
lives by seeing that the grand projects of discovering the furniture of
the universe have all failed. But analytic philosophy pretends today
not to be just one great movement in the history of philosophy–
which it certainly was- but to be philosophy itself. This self–
descriptionJorces
analytic philosophers (even if they reject Ayer's par–
ticular views) to keep coming up with new "solutions" to the problem
of the Furniture of the Universe - solutions which become more and
more bizarre, and which have lost all interest outside of the philo–
sophical community. Thus we have a paradox: at the very moment
when analytical philosophy is recognized as the "dominant move–
ment" in world philosophy, analytical philosophy has come to the
end of its own project - the dead end, not the completion.
I want to suggest that there is another way of reading the
history of philosophy in the twentieth century. In Ayer's reading, it
all went somehow beserk after philosophers stopped talking about
sense data and about how sense data are the "evidence" for every–
thing we know. (Ayer professes to be optimistic, but on his de–
scription of the scene it is impossible to see why one should be.) I
suggest that two things have happened. The first, which the first half
