CONNECTIVE ANALYSIS AND BASIC CONCEPTS TADEUSZ SZUBKA

In his recent book Strawson discusses, among others things, his own favoured conception of analysis, which goes against a standard and widespread notion of what analysis consists in.' According to this standard view, analysis is an attempt to decompose complex concepts or ideas into their simple parts. The aim of analysis is to clarify or make transparent the content of the concepts under consideration by reducing them, without reminder, to their simple components. In such an analysis the central role is played by the notion of simple or ultimate constituents, which can be called atoms of analysis, and the process of reducing complex concepts to these simple elements. So this model or programme of analysis may justifiably be called reductive or atomistic analysis. These terms may suggest that Strawson has in mind here the model of analysis which was made popular between the two World Wars mainly due to the writings of Bertrand Russell. This is a false suggestion: although advocates of this programme of analysis have very often taken a particular view of the nature of these ultimate elements of analysis, equating them sometimes with impressions or sense data, there is no essential connection here. One can be a strong proponent of the reductive model of analysis and equally strongly opposed to the idea of phenomenalistic reduction. We can say then that Strawson's conception of reductive analysis is very broad and, to some extent, insubstantial, which allows him to treat as its advocates most analytical philosophers (including perhaps W.V. Quine, M.A.E. Dummett, J.A. Fodor, S.R. Schiffer, to mention only a few). Clear evidence of the common acceptance, at least implicitly, of this model of analysis is for Strawson the overestimation by philosophers of the charge of circularity. This can be explained only by

141

TADEUSZ SZUBKA

assuming that they are held captive by the reductive conception of analysis, according to which the charge of circularity is really damaging: it shows that one's attempts at analysis do not make any progress in decomposing a given concept and finding in it simple elements from the Ultimate level. This reductive conception of analysis Strawson contrasts with what he takes to be a more realistic and more fertile model of analysis, which he calls the connective model. He describes it in the following way: Let us imagine, instead, the model of an elaborate network, a system, of connected items, concepts, such that the function of each item, each concept, could, from the philosophical point of view, be properly understood only by grasping its connections with the others, its place in the system--perhaps better still, the picture of a set of interlocking systems of such a kind. If this becomes our model, then there will be no reason to be worried if, in the process of tracing connections from one point to another of the network, we find ourselves returning to, or passing through, our starting-point (p. 19). Under acceptance of this model of analysis the charge of circularity loses its universal appeal. It can be damaging only for these supposed analyses where we move in a small and unilluminating circle, i.e. establish connections between concepts too closely related to each other or merely apparently different. What entitles us to describe connective analysis as "more realistic" than reductive analysis? Strawson seems to rely here on two arguments. The first points to the fact that all so far proposed programmes of reductive analysis, e.g. empiricism or phenomenalism, have failed. This argument is supported by the other, more substantial one, which refers to the way in which our system of beliefs is organized. According to Strawson, the beliefs of each of us do not constitute a kind of hierarchy "with higher members resting on lower members which are the individual's evidence for them or his reasons for

142

CONNECTIVE ANALYSIS AND BASIC CONCEIrI'S

believing them, and these lower members resting on still lower members until we come to the lowest level of all, the fundamental level" (p. 93). Roughly speaking, the foundationalist picture of our beliefs and reasons for them is doomed to failure. An adequate account of the matter can be given only by a holistic theory which treats our beliefs as a corpus of mutually supporting items. We can grant that this corpus is the result of causal interaction with the independently existing world but we must firmly stick to Wittgenstein's remark: "When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions". Someone who conceives the method of philosophy along reductive lines can quite easily and naturally makes sense of the idea of basic or fundamental concepts which philosophy aims to discover. They are to be identified with the ultimate and simple elements of reductive analysis. They are just those concepts which cannot be decomposed or reduced to any other concepts.-' It seems also quite natural that someone who conceives the method of philosophy along the lines of connective analysis will be committed to the view that our concepts, being mutually and in many ways connected, are on a par with each other. In consequence, philosophy should aim to elucidate or clarify this network of concepts, without any (futile) attempt to discover the ultimate or basic concepts which are absolutely fundamental in our conceptual scheme. However this is not Strawson's intention. Quite the contrary: while stressing the adequacy of connective analysis for philosophy, he still wants to subscribe to the idea that we should took for the concepts which are basic or fundamental, which enjoy some kind of priority in our conceptual scheme. But how to square these two, prima facie conflicting metaphilosophical claims? There are two strategies for answering this question. The first takes the idea of the basic or the fundamental for granted and tries to interpret in an appropriate way the model of connective analysis; the other vice versa: taking the model of connective analysis as it stands, makes an effort to find nonreductive sense of basicness. Someone adopting the first strategy could argue in the following way. When Strawson sets connective against reductive analysis, he does not have in mind an entirely new kind of analysis which proceeds

143

TADEUSZ SZUBKA

in a radically different way. He still has in mind ordinary conceptual or definitional analysis, but without the mistaken assumption that the items which are irreducible, or which enjoy conceptual priority, must be absolutely simple. That is to say, the advocate of connective analysis disagrees with proponents of reductive analysis not about the principles of performing analysis, but about its limits. For instance, in Strawson's procedure of distinguishing in our experience of the world (p. 59ff) the subjective aspect, which consists in the fact it is a kind of awareness from a certain point at any moment of our mental history, from the objective aspect, which consists in the fact that it is a kind of awareness of something being out there, the advocate of reductive analysis could not find anything questionable. He or she would only insist that such an analysis is philosophically unsatisfactory, that it must be supplemented by further steps in which complex notions of subjective and objective aspects will be decomposed. Or take another example based on Strawson's earlier writings (mainly on Individuals): perhaps it is possible to analyse human society exclusively in terms of persons and their relations, but we should resist reductive pressures to dismantle the complex notion of a person into such notions as: mind, body, animal, material object, etc. One must simply acknowledge that the concept of a person, however complex, is primitive and irreducible. But such a construal of connective analysis, which fits very well with the idea of basic or fundamental concepts, becomes implausible when set against many substantial philosophical statements made by Strawson. The analyses in which we decompose a given concept into two or more elements, "without reminder", seems to play a very peripheral role in his thought. At all the crucial points of his philosophy he stresses mutual connections: between judgement, concept and experience; between belief, desire and action; between meaning, truth and knowledge; etc. Even the above suggestion about the possibility of a reductive analysis of the notion of human society appears to be doubtful in light of the following passage: For it is not as if each one of us builds up his cognitive picture of the world, acquires his concepts, develops his techniques and habits of action in isolation; and then, as it were, at a certain point, enters into relation with other

144

CONNECTIVE ANALYSIS AND BASIC CONCEPTS

human beings and confronts a new set of questions and problems. On the contrary. All this cognitive, conceptual, and behavioural development takes place in a social context; and in particular, the acquisition of language, without which developed thinking is inconceivable, depends on interpersonal contact and communication (p. 81).~ It seems therefore that the first strategy is ruled out and we should rather try to work out a conception of basicness which does not conflict with the holistic principles of connective analysis. And this is the way in which Strawson himself prefers to approach this matter when he gives an account of the sense in which the ability to use concepts of the special, advanced disciplines depends on the ability to use ordinary, everyday concepts. He writes: Our mastery of the concepts of the specialized disciplines must somehow be made to grow out of the conceptual materials we have mastered already. We have no need to enquire exactly how this is done--by what processes of refinement, extension, or analogy--though we can be pretty sure that it is not simply a matter of strictly defining new theoretical concepts in terms of pre-theoretical concepts. For the point I am making is an extremely simple one: that the acquisition of the theoretical concepts of the special disciplines presupposes and rests upon the possession of the pretheoretical concepts of ordinary life (p. 21). Of course, Strawson does not want to commit himself to the absurd claim that all our ordinary concepts are basic or fundamental in the philosophical sense. So he introduces a few amendments and constraints which lead to the following definition: A concept or concept-type is basic in the relevant sense if it is one of a set of general, pervasive, and ultimately irreducible concepts or concept-types which together

145

TADEUSZ SZUBKA

form a structure--a structure which constitutes the framework of our ordinary thought and talk and which is presupposed by the various specialist or advanced disciplines that contribute, in their diverse ways, to our total picture of the world (p. 24). For perhaps everyone who is unfamiliar with Strawson's other writings, these two passages would appear as a statement of a simple psychological truth that we start to think about the world in a crude, ordinary way, and then, having mastered this elementary ability of thinking, can entertain more sophisticated and specific thoughts and gain more advanced knowledge. But this is clearly not Strawson's aim. He seems to be more committed to a Kantian programme of finding a general and indispensable conceptual framework making our thought about the world possible. Psychological enquiries do not reveal this framework; they simply assume it. But it is quite plausible to suppose that almost everyone who is at least slightly familiar with Strawson's other writings will point out presupposition as a crucial notion for understanding these passages. Presupposition is a rather well-defined concept in relation to sentences, or propositions, or statements. It is usually taken as a semantic notion and characterized in reference to truth-values or truth conditions. Here is an example of such a definition: a sentence A presupposes a proposition ~ if and only if, for any possible world i, if A expresses a proposition that is either true or false in i, then ~ is true in i. ~ This definition traces back to early works by Strawson, and even to some of Frege's ideas. Of course, these two philosophers do not refer in their formulations to possible worlds, so if one wants to follow them more closely, the semantic definition of presupposition can be put in this way: a sentence A presupposes a proposition O if and only if the truth of 0 is a necessary condition of the truth or falsity of A. Assuming that alluding to necessity is here rather inessential, one can even put the definition in common logical term, by saying, for example: a sentence A presupposes a sentence B if and only if both (a)

146

CONNECTIVE ANALYSIS AND BASIC CONCEPTS

A implies B, and (b) -A implies B.' If this is, for some reason, unsatisfactory and too weak, one can always replace the ordinary concept of implication by strict implication or entailment. But there are thinkers (mainly linguists) who believe that this purely semantical approach to presupposition is mistaken. They insist, using as evidence intuitions and natural assumptions of speakers in various speech situations, as well as facts about the way in which the presuppositions of compound sentences are constituted, that presupposition is strictly speaking a pragmatic phenomenon and should he defined in relation to a given context of speech or discourse. That is to say, presupposition is to be associated not with sentences or propositions but with particular utterances or statements. ~ Nonetheless, all those discussions are not essential to the argument of this essay. I think that, at least for its purpose, one can safely assume that the discussions are permeated by a common general idea of what presupposition is, and that the controversies concern rather more detailed matters. If so, let us ask how to modify this common idea of presupposition holding between sentences, or propositions, or statements as to suit it to the relation of presupposition holding between concepts? The modification is not straightforward, since in the case of concepts we cannot talk about truth-values and retain the distinction between truth and falsity in a literal sense. But perhaps we can talk about concepts having content and concepts which fail to have it. In short, the distinction between genuine and non-genuine (spurious) concepts seems to be useful here. 7 We may try then to describe presupposition for concepts in the following way: a concept C presupposes a concept D if and only if when D is not going to have content, C is not going to have content either. To put it differently: D being a genuine concept is a necessary condition of C being a genuine concept. But if this relation of presupposition is essential to the content of concept C, indeed is its necessary condition, one can infer from that fact that the content of concept D is in some sense constitutive of the content of concept C, forms a part of it, as it were. If this claim seems to be dubious the analogy with the analysis of knowledge can make it more plausible. If among the necessary conditions of knowledge we include belief, justification and truth, we do not want to claim that knowledge is something separate from these

147

TADEUSZ SZUBKA

three elements. Perhaps having a belief which is true and justified is not equal to having knowledge (some additional conditions must also be fulfilled), but these three elements contribute to knowledge, are constitutive of it. So it is quite understandable that in the definition of knowledge these elements are usually referred to. In the same way one can expect that in the definition of concept C the content of concept D will be mentioned. However Strawson evidently does not want to go so far since in the above passage in which he talks about the concepts of special disciplines presupposing possession of the ordinary concepts he explicitly states "that it is not simply a matter of strictly defining new theoretical concepts in terms of pre-theoretical concepts". Moreover, what is at least equally important, the account of presupposition for concepts proposed above faces the following difficulty (which may be called the failure of relevance). It seems evident that C presupposes D if and only if when necessarily if C has content then D has content. Now suppose that some concept D has content which seems to be an essential feature of that concept (for instance 'it' which could not have lacked content). Thus necessarily D has content, and then--by the logic of strict implication--for any concept C, necessarily if C has content then D has content. Hence C presupposes D. To eliminate this failure we may try to formulate the above account in terms of the conditions relevant for grasping concepts: C presupposes D if and only if when necessarily whoever grasps C also grasps D. Or, more radically, we may repudiate the idea of concept presupposition altogether and try to formulate those dependencies in the familiar terms of presuppositions holding between sentences, or propositions, or statements. We would then say, for instance, that the sentence "A person x has acquired a concept C" presupposes the sentence "A person x possesses a pre-theoretical concept D (or a relevant set of such concepts)", and that problem of acquiring C does not even arise (the sentence does not have a truth-value) if the person does not have a pretheoretical concept(s) D. But this manoeuvre is unlikely to work. After all, we may want to know why this sentence does not have a truthvalue, especially if the person in question claims that he or she has acquired a concept C. The most plausible explanation would be to say that what the person claims the concept C to be is really not a genuine

148

CONNECTIVE ANALYSIS AND BASIC CONCEPTS

concept at all, since in order to grasp it one should first have a concept (or a set of concepts) D, which this person does not have. And in this way we are back at the troublesome issue of concept presupposition. But if we agree on the above definition of presupposition holding between concepts, that is, that C presupposes D if and only if when necessarily whoever grasps C also grasps D, then it appears that in order to find the relation of presupposition crucial to understanding connective analysis we must leave the level of structural dependencies among concepts and their contents and return to the functional level: to the order in which we, human beings, use the concepts. The following statement of Strawson unambiguously supports this move: "Here then, is one way in which concepts can be ordered in respect of priority: the ability to operate with one set of concepts may presuppose the ability to operate with another set, and not vice versa" (p.21). But then it is hard to see how we can remain within the limits of philosophical connective analysis, however broadly construed, and not engage in a kind of psychological explanation, especially if we take into account Strawson's conviction that all attempts to reach God's eye view, or the perspective which any conceivable rational being must share, are futile and illusory. Strawson would undoubtedly stress generality of the established connections and dependencies, but it seems to me that reference to generality or pervasiveness is by itself unable to rebut the charge of making psychological or anthropological observations under a guise of philosophical analysis. ~ DEPARTMENT OF LOGIC & THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF LUBLIN 20-950 L U B L I N POLAND

NOTES Analysis and Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. If otherwise not indicated, the page numbers in the text refer to this book. At one point Strawson elucidates the notion of basicness involved here by way of the notion of explanation. He writes: "... any philosopher who believes in the atomic or simple elements of reductive analysis, however he conceives them, will obviously view these simple elements

149

TADEUSZ SZUBKA

in a special light. He will view them as basic to our whole conceptual structure, to our entire conception of the world; for everything else is to be explained in terms of them, while they are not to be explained in terms of anything else" (p. 20). This must be treated as the statement of a necessary but not sufficient condition of basicness; otherwise it would be false, since explanation takes many different forms, not only the form of reduction. These substantial philosophical statements have their metaphilosophical counterpart in the thesis that philosophical disciplines, especially metaphysics, epistemology and logic, constitute a unified and mutually connected inquiry, so none of them can claim a right to absolute priority. R. Stalnaker, "Logical Semiotic", in: E. Agazzi (ed.), Modern Logic-- A Survey, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981, p. 444. Various semantic definitions of presupposition and their relationships are discussed in detail by N. Burton-Roberts, The Limits to Debate: A Revised Theory of Semantic Presupposition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. See also P.A.M. Seuren, "Presupposition", in: R.E. Asher (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 6, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994, pp. 3311-3320. Although Strawson is considered as a thinker who explicitly introduced the semantic definition of presupposition into logico-linguistic literature, one may also argue that his original idea of presupposition does have a pragmatic facet: truth and falsity are, in his view, ascribed not to sentences or propositions but to statements made by using them in a given context, and hence the relation of presupposition holds between context-dependent statements. The distinction has been inspired by reading C. Peacocke's A Study of Concepts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. But I do not rely here on any particular doctrine of that book. I am very grateful to Sir P.F. Strawson and Tim Williamson for reading a version of this essay and making useful comments. The essay was written during my tenure of the British Council Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford, in the spring of 1993. In preparation of the final version I profited from the suggestions of the Editor of Philosophia.

150