Major Theses of Modern Western Philosophy

The different schools of modern Western philosophy and different philosophers have emphasized and studied in depth the questions of knowledge and truth, nature and man, language and meaning. They have clarified their views by exploring these issues. The new trends in the development of modern Western philosophy can also be seen through the accounts of these issues. The debate on the question of truth and the question of certainty in modern Western philosophy originated from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's answer to these two questions. According to the classical definition given by Aristotle, truth is the conformity of thought, judgment and actuality. Later, any adherence to this definition in matters of truth was called conformism.

In modern Western philosophy, a number of philosophers have insisted on the conformism of truth or the objectivity of truth, the most famous of whom are Tarski and Popper. But the philosophical schools and philosophers who oppose conformism, or replace it with some form of coherentism, are overwhelmingly dominant. The first wave of attacks on conformism was set off by pragmatists and neo-Hegelians. Neo-Hegelians generally adopt the typical coherent theory, which interprets truth as consistency between judgments or appearances. Pragmatists, on the other hand, proposed new forms of coherentism. Peirce, for example, defines truth as that which is confirmed under ideal conditions of research, or that which is accepted at the end of research. This so-called new form is called "confirmationism".

At the beginning of the 20th century, many empiricists, including members of the Vienna School and thoroughgoing empiricists, rejected the whole concept of "truth" as "metaphysical". Dewey, for example, replaced the notion of "truth" with "reasoned assertability". Later, more empiricists agreed with Peirce that the question of whether a theory is true should be replaced by the question of whether it is best. They believed that asking and answering the question "Is the best scientific theory true?" is meaningless.

Representatives of the new generation of pragmatists rejected both the a priori philosophical argument that conceptual form must necessarily conform to intuitive content and the efforts of scientific positivists to find some special relation between language and the world; they emphasized that theory and the world we know are one and the same thing, and argued that the whole program of modern epistemology in defense of empirical science was futile. In this way, pragmatism eventually evolved into historical relativism.

Kuhn and others also interpreted truth as agreement, also known as "coherence theory". This is the latest form of coherentism. The second wave of attacks on conformism came from existentialism, phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics. It is characterized by the substitution of interpretation for objective truth, the opposition of relativism to conformism, and ultimately the fundamental elimination of the concept of truth. Among these attackers, the most famous representative is Heidegger. He criticized the "Western metaphysics" since the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, in fact, criticized the conformism of truth. He was very dissatisfied with Husserl's continued acceptance of conformism and sought to transform hermeneutics into this present hermeneutics.

Merleau-Ponty also rejected conformism and tried to restore the truth of various kinds of experience, such as aesthetics, dreams, myths, and perceptions, and to pluralize truth by placing them alongside scientific experience. The most serious challenge to conformism came from the whole trend of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics itself is characterized by a fundamental critique of Objectivist metaphysics, the natural scientific way of thinking, and the concept of truth. Both it and late structuralism have fallen into extreme relativism on the question of truth.

Foucault, for example, refused to recognize the facts that positivists talked about, arguing that "facts" were merely a disguise for the original interpretation. The interpretation of facts is the interpretation of the original interpretation, and the interpretation never ends. He argues that there is nothing absolutely original to be explained, because fundamentally everything has already been explained, and every mark is an explanation of every other mark. Derrida likewise replaces the discovery of truth with the interpretation of marks or texts. He finds it impossible to distinguish between notation and denotation. For each sign is a denotation, and its denotation is another denotation, but never what Husserl calls a concrete presentation of the "thing-in-itself".

The third attack on conformism came from within analytic philosophy, especially from the scientific positivist H. Putnam. Scientific positivism claims a special relation between language and the world, a relation that shows why consistent theories are at the same time theories of conformity to the real.

Sellars saw this relationship as facsimile or depiction. Putnam, on the other hand, saw scientific theories as a kind of "map of the world," but he later called the claim that the referent is outside the theory or system of description "metaphysical positivism" and distinguished it from the claim that the referent is inside the theory or system of description, "intrinsic positivism," which is the claim that the referent is inside the theory or system of description, or that the referent is inside the theory or system of description. "intrinsic positivism".

Putnam, too, no longer believed in the kind of "conformity" that determines the relation between allegory and truth. He attacked conformism on the basis of the Skowron theorem of mathematical logic. Applying this theorem to any domain of objects, Putnam argued that it is only within a belief system, i.e., a system of categorization and naming, that one can speak of this or that object, whereas between different belief systems, the same words and sentences can speak of different objects, and there is no "conformity" relation. But all Putnam has shown is that a class of true propositions that cannot be expressed in first-order logic (see First-Order Theory and its Meta-Logic) successfully refers to objects. He did not prove that one cannot achieve independent reference by any other means. In his view, "truth" is some kind of idealized or rational acceptability, not conformity to an extra-mental or extra-linguistic "reality".

Putnam claimed to have ended the life of conformism, which had lasted for more than 2,000 years, but in essence he was replacing conformism with another form of coherentism. Various other forms of coherentism have declared the death of conformism more than once, but their successors are still attacking conformism continuously, which demonstrates the resilience of conformism from the opposite side. Indefiniteness is a goal long pursued by Western philosophers. Aristotle believed that scientific knowledge is indeed proven truth. Rationalists and empiricists have sought for exactitude through different avenues, from intellectual intuition or sensory experience. Kant tried to find the basis for the certainty of knowledge in the structure of the subject, and modern empiricists try to find it in the system of language.

Among the major schools of modern Western philosophy, those who have inherited the tradition since Aristotle and insisted that scientific knowledge should be certain and unquestionable are Husserl's phenomenological school, neo-Kantianism, logical atomism, and most of the logical positivists, while those who oppose the classical philosophical tradition and think that the search for certainty is futile and claim that scientific knowledge is fallible are French positivism represented by Comte, W. Hughes, and the French empiricism represented by W. Hughes. , English philosophy of science represented by W. Hewell (1795-1866), and pragmatism, existentialism, hermeneutics, and so on, but also Nietzsche and Bergson, among others. Popper, on the other hand, wavered between these two tendencies, recognizing both the conformism of truth and the objectivity of knowledge, and insisting that scientific knowledge is fallible and unprovable. In modern Western philosophy, the insistence on the position of certitude is constantly being seriously challenged and faced with insurmountable difficulties, and it is generally recognized that the Aristotelian view of scientific knowledge is outdated.

The problem of certitude consists of two aspects, namely, the certitude of theories and the certitude of the premises of reasoning:

①On the certitude of theories

In the 17th century, F. Bacon, I. Newton, and others were convinced that the methods of research used in science could yield true theories with absolute reliability. However, these so-called absolutely reliable scientific methods, whether it is the "proofs of posteriority" of R. Descartes and others, or the method of elimination of induction, the so-called "invention of the machine" of Bacon and others, were later generally doubted, and were regarded as a form of reasoning that could not lead to conclusions. It was later generally discredited and recognized as a form of reasoning that could not lead to conclusions. As a result, modern Western philosophers generally no longer defend science on the basis of the certainty or truth of its conclusions, but rather on the basis of its continuous progress toward truth.

J. Herschel, Comte, and Hewell were all very concerned with the progress of science and its gradual approach to truth. An important feature of early positivism was that it understood the examination of science as the examination of the history of science, and it denied that there was a science in a state of completion. In its view, scientific truth was no longer eternal, nor even valid at all times; nor was scientific knowledge infallible, but contained errors. But it holds that the scientific method is inherently self-correcting, and that it is through self-correction that science progresses. This progress is not the increase and accumulation of proven truths, but the replacement of one part of truth by another.

Popper believed that even if a scientific theory is in fact true, one cannot know with certainty that it is true. He pointed out that if there are many more true inferences (true content) drawn from one false theory than from another false theory, and many fewer false inferences (false content) drawn from it than from one false theory. Then the two false theories are comparable, and one of them has a greater degree of fidelity than the other. In his view, scientific progress lies in the growth of theory fidelity, and the only way for scientific theories to get closer and closer to the truth is to keep progressing. Although Popper denied the veracity of theories, he recognized their possible truth. Lakatos and L. Laudan, on the other hand, like Peirce, substitute scientific progress for truth. The historical relativists, on the other hand, like Nietzsche, denied not only truthfulness and veracity, but even scientific progress.

② On the certainty of the premises of reasoning

Since inductive reasoning cannot really prove scientific theories, most modern Western philosophers deny the certainty of scientific theories. Other philosophers who defend the tradition, although they also believe that the search for certainty cannot be resorted to inference, believe that there is, after all, something in human beliefs or knowledge that is indeed certain, and that the edifice of science is not, after all, built on a sandy beach. Their conviction of the existence of fundamental propositions, and their belief that these propositions are capable of giving a defense to other propositions without themselves being dependent on any other propositions, is rather similar in character to the straightforwardly obvious fundamental truths set forth by Aristotle.

Russell, Moore, Carnap, Lewis, Iyer, R. M. Chisholm, and others who have sought to find the certainty of the premises of reasoning have believed that these propositions are indeed undoubted. But there was a great deal of debate among them about which propositions were fundamental or what was fundamental.

The traditional view regarded the propositions of sensory impressions or sensory information, as fundamental, and later it was argued that the propositions of certain mental states of the subject himself were fundamental, and more philosophers of science thought that it was the propositions of various observations that were fundamental. What they **** in common is the attempt to reduce all scientific propositions to basic propositions, and thus to give scientific knowledge veracity. But not only did the early reductionist program of Russell and Carnap end in failure, but the later attempts of Iyer and Carnap to resolve the problem of the meaningfulness of theoretical propositions by reducing them to observational propositions were ultimately futile.

Starting in the late 1950s, N. R. Hansen first made explicit the view that observational terms are full of theories, which deprives observational propositions of their veracity as fundamental propositions. This view soon replaced the logical positivist orthodoxy about the strict distinction between two languages, and observational evidence was no longer the main basis for comparative evaluation of theories, since observation is always "contaminated by theory" and there is no such thing as a neutral observation. Thus, it is not observation that determines theory, but theory that determines observation, and there is, as Kuhn and Feuerabend argued, no ****same language between the different theories, which is therefore incommensurable or incomparable. Observational reports and scientific theories, and even observations themselves, have neither certainty nor truth. In this way, the basic principles of the classical philosophical tradition are completely abandoned. However, these relativistic views were not universally accepted. Scientific positivists, while completely abandoning the veracity of theoretical and observational evidence, seek to preserve the objectivity of truth and to compare, evaluate, and select theories in a variety of different ways (including various inductive logics or normative methodologies). Scientific positivism asserts that the objects, states, and processes depicted by correct theories are real, and that much of the unobservable in the microcosm is as real as things in the everyday environment. It also argues that even when scientific theories are not yet correct, people tend to have views that are close to correct. Among modern Western philosophers, the famous representatives of the scientific existentialist view are: the late Russell and Carnap, Popper, Quine, Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, S.A. Kripke, A.N. Chomsky, Shapiro and so on.

Anti-positivism asserts, in contrast to scientific positivism, that electrons, photons, the genetic code, etc., do not exist. It states that there are indeed electrical and genetic phenomena in nature, but that the reason we construct theories about microscopic states, processes, and objects is simply to predict and generate the situations we are interested in. Thus, the electronic and genetic codes are fictions, and theories about them are merely tools of computation. It argues that, however much one may admire the discursive and engineering triumphs of the natural sciences, even the most valid scientific theories should not be taken as true, and that theories are no more than what is appropriate and useful or justified and applicable.

Positivists, pragmatists, members of the Vienna School, historical relativists, and Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein are all representatives of anti-positivism. Pragmatists believe that there is no need to argue with common sense, and that if people stop doubting the value of electrons in the future, then it is as real as a chair. Positivists and logical pragmatists, on the other hand, say that we cannot believe in electrons because they can never be seen.

Scientific positivists and antipositivists do not disagree much about the reality of observable objects in everyday life and scientific research. The debate between them centers on the existence of unobservable "rational objects," including particles, fields, processes, structures, states, and so on. The question of the reality of atoms and molecules was at the center of the debate in the philosophy of science, and it was in this debate that the various positions of scientific positivism were formed.

As a result of the constant advances in science and technology, anti-positivist views about certain objects often had to eventually give way to positivism. On the question of the reality of atoms and molecules, anti-positivism has had to give way to positivism. This trend, caused by the development of the natural sciences, is also indicative of the direction of modern Western philosophy, in which the territory of scientific positivism is expanding and the territory of anti-positivism is shrinking.

On the question of the reality of theoretical objects, the debate between scientific positivism and anti-positivism involves not only the question of whether the theoretical objects of physics and biology are real or not, but also the question of the reality of the theoretical objects of psychology and social science. To the latter question, various complexities are presented in modern Western philosophy. Some scientific positivists see only the reality of the theoretical objects of physics, ignore or even deny the reality of the theoretical objects of psychology and the social sciences, or think that it is meaningless to talk about the reality of such objects.

These positivists often call themselves physicalists, the most famous figure being Quine. Quine and others recognized only abstract objects such as physical objects (objects) and mathematical sets, and denied the mind as another kind of object, arguing that mental predicates are only directly applicable to persons taken as objects. Physicalists generally believe that, according to atomic theory, any physical difference is a difference in the number, arrangement, or orbits of motion of the atoms that are constituents of an object. For, without such physical differences, there can be no factual differences, and especially no mental differences. In the physicalist's view, if a person is twice in the same physical state, then his mind and all unrealized intentions of thought and action will be identical.

With the development of modern physics, physicalism showed a new tendency, the basic theory they used to observe the world, the transition from atomism to field theory, the different states of things, in various degrees of inequality directly attributed to the different space-time zones, and thus ultimately abandoned the object itself. This so-called new ontology is essentially a pure set theory, a purely mathematical abstract ontology. It is not only extremely abstract, but also completely ignores the importance of human beings, social history and culture, and the "objective spirit," in sharp contrast to continental European philosophy. Contemporary philosophers in Britain and the United States inherited the tradition of Western classical philosophy and were mainly concerned with the question of "what exists". The phenomenological and existential philosophers of continental Europe are concerned with human beings, and they seek to overcome the division and antagonism between object and subject, nature and human beings, and to find a way of synthesis and unity in human existence and history.

Sartre called his system "phenomenological ontology". He divided existence into two parts: self-existence (nature) and self-existence (history). The former implies the preservation of one's own sameness, whose change is cyclical; the latter is defined in terms of negativity, which lies in the will not to preserve sameness, but to demand difference. However, Sartre failed to solve the problem of "how the self emerges from the self" because he stayed in the dualistic position. His major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, is almost entirely devoted to the discussion of selfhood, and seldom talks about self-existence. So he actually turned ontology into the philosophy of history.

Sartre and his companions preached humanism, which holds that the existence of the world lies in the emergence of man. Their humanism was characterized by the claim to make man divine, to have the power to be creative and to bring the world into existence.In 1947, Heidegger accused Sartre's humanism of being the quintessential metaphysics rather than the phenomenological ontology that he claimed to be. For in Heidegger's view, a phenomenological ontology should be a theory of existence based solely on a faithful description of phenomena.

Merleau-Ponty abandoned Sartre's view of the opposition between the self and the self, and became the forerunner of the French "existential phenomenology". His phenomenological program was precisely to describe what lies between self and self, between consciousness and things, between freedom and nature. He ruled out the either/or approach of traditional philosophy on this issue, arguing that the existential human being is neither purely self-existent nor purely self-acting. The resolution of this opposition, he argues, does not lie in reconciling or dissolving two opposite views, much less in rejecting the assumption that led to the opposition. In Merleau-Ponty's view, the solution is to be found in the "in-between" or in the "finite" synthesis, that is, an unfinished and unstable synthesis. He points out that the facts of history testify to the fact that this synthesis is emerging every day and that the human being is neither a pure thing nor a pure consciousness. It is both a productive thing and a producer; both active and passive; a subject and an object.

In modern Western philosophy, Heidegger was the first to turn phenomenology into ontology, but Heidegger introduced the concept of "existence" to inquire into the so-called human being's here and now, which is completely unrelated to the traditional ontology of the study of "what exists". According to Heidegger, it is only because of human existence that the question of existence is raised, and he rejects the "objectified thinking" that results from traditional metaphysics, pointing out that human beings belonged to existence (the world) in a much more primitive way long before propositions about human beings came into being.

Thinking, in his view, is not a "subject" standing opposite the real, nor is it an "object"; it is wholly committed to existence. He pointed out that language is not a subjective representation of an object, but the self-expression of being in place of man, and that it is not man who speaks, but being. In his later writings, Heidegger made it clear that what poets and thinkers say is more primitive than the objective narratives of science. This led him deeper and deeper into mysticism. By linguistic analysis, analytic philosophy refers mainly to the logical analysis of scientific language or the semantic analysis of everyday language.Within the first three decades of the twentieth century, many analytic philosophers favored grammatical or syntactic studies, i.e., the study of the formal relations between designations purely in terms of logic, without reference to the content of language. At the same time, the question of the analysis of the meaning of utterances and the question of whether there are criteria for the meaningfulness of an utterance has been intensively studied with them.

From the 1930s Tarski and other Polish logicians, strongly advocated the semantic method, and by the mid-1930s, and especially after the early 1940s, thanks to Tarski's two papers on the concept of truth, analytic philosophers became interested in the semantic method as a recognized tool for the study of scientific language.

In semantics, Frege's views have been y influential for more than 100 years. Frege argued that semantic relations cannot be talked about because we can never stand outside such relations and talk about them; they are presupposed for all our conversations. Because of this, he did not state his theory of semantics explicitly. Wittgenstein and Quine have a similar view of language as a universal medium for all talk. So, they either doubt the possibility of semantics; or they do not state their theory of semantics.

The first step in departing from the Fregean tradition is the shift from the view of language as a universal medium to the view of language as an algorithm. On the basis of this shift, logical semantics (see model theory) gained slow momentum. Another step away from Frege's model was accomplished by possible worlds semantics. In possible worlds semantics, individuals appear not only in the real world, but also in many different possible worlds, so that individuals are very much like functions, and it can be deduced that everything in them is a function.

In the semantics of possible worlds, what Frege calls subpropositions do not exist, and there is no such thing as the semantics of primitive individuals. The game semantics, inspired by Wittgenstein's theory of "language games", is the greatest departure from Frege's system; it introduces the notion of semantic relativity, which is incompatible with any approach to primitive logic as the only standard notation, and it even calls into question the notion of logical form.

Since the 1960s, there has also been a great development in pragmatics, which focuses on the study of speech acts and the contexts in which they are accomplished, with particular attention to the study of semantically reinforcing speech acts, indirect speech acts, and indicatives, among others. The theory of speech acts has its roots in Wittgenstein's later ideas, and it is an important part of the philosophy of everyday language. French semiotics asserts that human language is akin to a communication or exchange system. Among them, semiotic structuralism regards the phenomenon of language as a communication phenomenon and the rules of natural language as the codes people use to transmit information; structural anthropology further compares the whole social life to the process of exchanging signals. Lacan proposed that "the unconscious is structured like language", which expresses the basic principle of semiotic structuralism on the issue of language. Structural anthropology seeks a universal code that expresses the properties of particular structures in all aspects of social life, believing that with this universal code, the invariant of all structures is found, and the diversity of cultures, languages, and customs can be accounted for.

According to the semiotic understanding, meaning arises from notation or from an initial opposition between "yes" and "no", "yes" and "no". "The meaning of communication is not the meaning of experience, but the meaning acceptable to experience in a conversation that expresses experience according to a code, a system of representations of oppositions; there is no pre-established harmony between language and experience, it is the code that determines the appropriateness of expression, not the person who sends the code; the person is subject to the code, and it is the structure, not the person, that determines everything. It is the structure, not the person, that determines everything. Hermeneutics attempts to transcend the entire "metaphysical" tradition in the matter of language and meaning. From Hegel and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida, there is a similar view that meaning arises in a dialectical relationship between the interpreter and the text, that each encounter between the two is an interpretation that takes place somewhere, sometime, and that the interpreter has to interpret the meaning of the text in terms of his own vision and linguistic capacities.

Differing from semiotics, hermeneutics emphasizes the importance of historical tradition and the role of the interpreter. According to Derrida, interpretation is the process of the interpreter's activity in generating meaning, and interpretation is not so much a passive reception as an active, interest-directed interpretive process which compensates for the deficiencies in the text. In his view, interpretation is not a mysterious conversation with a subject, but a translation of the subject matter, i.e., the meaning, presented in the notation.

On the question of meaning, semiotics and hermeneutics sometimes take the text as the unit with meaning, while the semantics of analytic philosophy takes the utterances and words of a natural or artificial language as the unit with meaning. From the point of view of analytic philosophy, semiotics and hermeneutics are not semantics, but closer to pragmatics and syntax.